


Days Are Numbered

by HiNerdsItsCat (HiLarpItsCat)



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Because It's ALWAYS Bittersweet Endings With Me, Bittersweet Ending, Conjugal Visit, Cuddling & Snuggling, Doctor Who Series 12 Spoilers, Enemies to Lovers to Something Complicated, Episode: s04e16 The Waters of Mars, Episode: s04e17-e18 The End of Time, Episode: s08e01 Deep Breath, Episode: s10e06 Extremis, Episode: s10e12 The Doctor Falls, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Implied Sexual Content, Imprisonment, Insomnia, Isolation, Manipulation, Memory Related, Mind Games, Mind Meld, Mind Melds Are Cheaper Than Therapy But Probably Worse For You, Other, Please Keep Your Arms And Legs Inside The Emotional Rollercoaster At All Times, Post-Episode: s12e10 The Timeless Children, Pre-Episode: Revolution of the Daleks, Prison, References to Earlier Seasons (tagged here), Touch-Starved, Toxic Relationship, but mostly hurt tbh, psychic connection, traumatic memories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-25
Updated: 2021-01-29
Packaged: 2021-03-18 08:01:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 22,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28988928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HiLarpItsCat/pseuds/HiNerdsItsCat
Summary: After twenty-one years, four months, and two days in prison, the Doctor receives a visitor with a very surprising announcement...“Apparently you’ve been very well behaved,” the Master replies pleasantly. “Well behaved enough, in fact, to be allowed a conjugal visit.”...an even more surprising explanation...“Do you remember back when you executed me at the request of those Fatality Index folks?” he asks. “Do you remember me pleading for my life and all that? The things we both said? Well, it turns out that those exact words are identical to the ones exchanged in wedding rites performed on Liaitia IV.” He pretends to look shocked. “What are the odds?”...and an extremely bizarre request:“I can’t sleep,” he says through clenched teeth. “All right? I can’t sleep and I didn’t know what else to do so I came here to find you.”Even though the Doctor doesn’t believe that the Master willactuallykeep his promise to help her escape, she decides to help him anyway because, after two decades of imprisonment and isolation, a slim hope and some brief company might be the only things that will see her through to the other side.
Relationships: The Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who), Thirteenth Doctor/The Master (Dhawan)
Comments: 59
Kudos: 89





	1. Playing For Time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _See you across the room, heart skips a beat_   
>  _The rush of danger feels like love_

**Prologue:**

She looks for him every time she walks the row of cages during her “exercise” period. She knows the odds are small enough that they might as well be impossible—that he would have been captured and imprisoned at all, let alone in the same prison at the same time as her—but most of their encounters happen under highly improbable circumstances, so she tells herself that it isn’t crazy of her to look.

For the first nine years, she tells herself that the reason she keeps looking for him is because he’s the most dangerous person she’s ever met and he _would_ be petty enough to infiltrate a prison just to cause her further pain—after all, didn’t he do that exact thing when she was exiled to Earth by the Time Lords? Not that it was difficult to break into _that_ particular “prison” since he had a TARDIS and she (in a manner of speaking) had not, so all he’d had to do was show up on Earth.

For the next three or four years, she tells herself that it’s because this might not be a real prison at all, but something _he_ put together just to torture her, and one day she’ll have the faintest glimmer of hope that she might escape before he reveals himself and crushes it.

She spends fifteen years in the prison before she admits the real reason: she wants to know that he’s alive… because there is every possibility that he isn’t.

It’s silly of her—because the universe hasn’t yet come up with a manner of death that he couldn’t find a way to wriggle out of—but if Ko Sharmus was fast enough with the detonator, then the Death Particle might have wiped him out as well.

She wonders what it says about her that she’s more upset about him than she is about Ko Sharmus, the human who sacrificed himself to save her.

It probably doesn’t say anything good.

She’s haunted by the memory of his eyes when she threatened to detonate it herself. In the past, when he taunted her like that—dared her to kill them both—it was always with the understanding that he knew there would be a way out, that he would survive no matter what.

This last time, though, she’s pretty sure that he really did want her to do it. He really did want her to end it. He—the most alive person she’s ever known—really did want to die.

So it’s possible that he just stood there in the Matrix chamber and let Ko Sharmus do it instead.

She used to have some notion of what was going on in his head, just like he knew what was going on in hers, but whatever understanding they once shared had died along with everything else on Gallifrey.

After fifteen years, four months, and eight days of imprisonment, she allows herself one day to grieve: to mourn the beautiful person who could weave truths and falsehoods like a tapestry, one that dazzled her every time. She mourns the genius whose thoughts were full of so many possibilities that the two of them could have remade the universe together if they had only found a way to stand on the same side. She mourns the boy she grew up with, who knew her better than anyone and who wouldn’t let her be complacent for a single second. She mourns her first kiss, the one they both vowed to never speak of again but that still hung suspended in the air between them every time they spoke. She mourns the feeling of elation that she always denies having whenever he reveals his true identity, even when she’s horrified by his actions at the same time.

She grieves for a single day, holding back the tears while she exercises until she’s back in her cell and then weeping the entire night.

It’s an indulgence and a dangerous one because there is every chance she might not come back from it—that she might just give into despair and let herself break. Knowing what she knows, seeing what she’s seen, living with what she’s done… it would break anyone. It would be understandable if it broke her as well.

But she doesn’t break. She doesn’t have the luxury, she tells herself: there are people out there waiting for her. 

(It doesn’t stop her from staring at the ceiling some nights and wondering if, when the time finally comes, she would let herself regenerate and spend another lifetime trapped in this place.)

The night ends, she dries her tears, and she tells herself that it’s time to move on.

(It doesn’t stop her from looking for him every time she exercises.)

But after twenty-one years, four months, and two days in this prison… something changes.

* * *

**Visit #1:**

A different symbol flashes on the wall that day: not the figure doing star jumps, which signals her scheduled exercise, but a pair of holding hands.

The Doctor knows that she should probably be concerned about this, but the change in routine is so incredible in itself that she suspects she wouldn’t object even if her eventual destination was being shoved out an airlock.

The place where she ends up is startling in how mundane it is: a room not much larger than her cell, but with a nicer (and slightly larger) bed than the one she sleeps in now, a small sink with some towels and toiletries, and a table with two chairs.

And sitting in one of the chairs, with the same face he had the last time she saw him, is the Master.

He is obviously trying very hard not to look smug, and meanwhile the Doctor is trying very hard not to look relieved, and she isn’t sure how well either of them are managing it. Still, the first thing she says to him is a weary sigh: “I should have known that you’d find a way to get posher digs than mine.” He even got to keep his own clothes, she thinks resentfully, and they’re not even _good_ clothes.

“I’m not a prisoner,” he corrects her. “I’m a visitor.”

“Of course you are,” she groans, taking a seat across the table from him. “Come to update me on all the atrocities I haven’t been able to stop you from committing?”

She braces herself for the worst—that the Earth is destroyed, that her friends are in agony, that the Death Particle didn’t detonate and armies of Cyber-converted Time Lords are conquering the universe piece by piece—but instead, he shrugs. “I just came to say hello.”

There is a profane term in nearly every language—usually one that refers to the waste byproduct of a beast of burden or other semi-harmless animal—utilised to convey scepticism of a particular claim or statement. The Doctor decides to go with one from the English language: “Bullshit.”

“They said you’ve been here for over two decades,” he says. “I thought you might want some company.”

She decides to humour him; whatever dramatic reveal he has will come out eventually. “I’m surprised they let you in here—well, surprised that they’ll be letting you _out_ again after.”

“Apparently you’ve been very well behaved,” the Master replies pleasantly. “Well behaved enough, in fact, to be allowed a conjugal visit.”

The Doctor stands up so suddenly that she knocks her chair over. _“Excuse me?”_

And _there’s_ the expression she’s been bracing herself for ever since she saw him here: the smirk before the gloating begins. “Ninety minutes, every ninety days. We get the room to ourselves. Unfortunately, I was searched _very_ thoroughly when I arrived—” He shifts a little in his chair and she pretends not to notice, because he’s probably making that part of it up. “—so I couldn’t smuggle in lockpicks for you. Or hide a metal file in a cake like they do in those Earth films.”

“That—that is the _least_ of my questions right now!” the Doctor sputters. “How did you manage to convince them that we’re—” But her mouth refuses to say the word.

“Because we _are,”_ he says cheerfully. Before she can fling another example of human profanity at him, he proceeds with the explanation: “Do you remember back when you executed me at the request of those Fatality Index folks?”

“I’m feeling a bit of regret now over how that turned out,” she replies drily, although it’s a lie: as upset as she is with him, she still doesn’t regret saving Missy and trying to help her become a better person, even if those efforts were ultimately futile.

“Oh, just wait,” the Master promises. “Do you remember me pleading for my life and all that? The things we both said?”

She can’t help flinching at the memory: at how Missy was almost in tears while begging, _“I’ll be good, I promise. I’ll turn good. Please, teach me, teach me how to be good.”_

Meanwhile the Doctor, still raw at the time from saying goodbye to River, was still murmuring his late wife’s final message: _“Without hope. Without witness. Without reward.”_

And then Missy said something that might have changed everything if she—or either of them really—had spoken it years before: _“I am your friend.”_

But it was too late. _“Makes no difference,”_ the Doctor replied sadly.

 _“I know it doesn’t,”_ Missy agreed. _“I know I’m going to die. I have to say it, the truth. Without hope. Without witness. Without reward. I am your friend.”_

Missy hadn’t even finished speaking before the Doctor decided how they were both going to get out of their predicament.

In the present, in their _current_ predicament, the Master nods. “Looks like you _do_ remember. Good. Well, it turns out that those _exact_ words are identical to the ones exchanged in wedding rites performed on Liaitia IV.” He pretends to look shocked. “What are the odds?”

The Doctor glares at him stonily and begins to pace back and forth. “Your handiwork, I assume?”

His grin widens. “It only took a _tiny_ bit of meddling in their world’s early history—though it’s also possible that I inadvertently became a minor death god in the process.”

She can’t help arching an eyebrow. “Only a minor one?”

“Either a minor death god or a major fertility goddess, depending on which civilization’s translation of the ancient holy texts you subscribe to.” He gestures at her overturned chair. “Have a seat, you’re tiring me out just watching you.”

It’s then that the Doctor notices how dark the circles are under the Master’s eyes. She resolves to ignore them for the time being, as well as his request for her to sit down again, though she does slow her pacing a little. “So you just turned up and claimed we got…” She still can’t _quite_ bring herself to say it. “That's ridiculous.”

“Is it?” he asks. “We exchanged the same set of words— _without hope, without witness, without reward—_ in front of an official legal representative, and then you vowed to be with me for a thousand years.”

“I vowed to _guard your body,”_ she interrupts, annoyed.

“Exactly,” he says, as though she hadn’t just disagreed with him. “There was even someone who showed up and confirmed for everyone assembled that you were recently widowed and therefore available—not that they care about _that_ sort of thing on Liaitia IV. All I had to do was call up a representative from the Fatality Index and get a sworn statement that we had in fact exchanged those words, and the rest was easy.”

“And when they issued the license or whatever, they didn’t seem to care that _I wasn’t there with you?”_ the Doctor demands incredulously.

He replies with a snort of amusement. “I explained the circumstances—that you were in prison—and they were very sympathetic. I even got a few homemade biscuits out of it. I would have brought you some, of course, but as I said, I was searched quite—”

“Stop,” she cuts the Master off before he can offer up any more innuendo, and then asks the question that she always seems to have to ask whenever they see one another: “Why are you doing this?”

“I wanted to see you.” He looks a little annoyed. “Isn’t that enough?”

“It’s never that simple with you,” she snaps. “You hate me, remember? You resent the fact that I was the source of the Time Lords’ ability to regenerate—through my own _exploitation,_ by the way, since it’s not like I was in a position to _offer_ when I was just a _child—”_ She shuts her mouth to keep herself from straying any further down that path: she’s managed to not think about it for over twenty years and she isn’t about to start unpacking the psychological trauma of her origins in front of the Master of all people.

But he’s probably heard enough to know that it’s bubbling under the surface, and she silently hopes that he won’t choose this moment to try and press her on it.

“You hate me,” she says again. “You could be anywhere in the universe and yet you came here. Why?”

Up until that point, the Master had been staring her in the eye, but now he stops and looks away as he mutters something. “What?” the Doctor asks. 

“I can’t sleep,” he repeats, louder and through clenched teeth. “All right? I can’t sleep and I didn’t know what else to do so I came here to find you.”

“So that I could, what, knock you unconscious?” She’ll grant him this much: it wasn’t the answer she had expected. “I’m sure there’s a very long list of people who will do that without you having to m—manipulate a culture’s history in order to see them.”

“It’s not as simple as that,” he replies, irritated. “I can’t lose consciousness _at all._ I’ve tried everything: blunt force, drugs, hypnosis, meditation, neural probes, sensory deprivation, and a whole host of things that aren’t really suitable for polite conversation, so I’ll just summarize and say that I’ve done everything short of regenerating, and I’m not even sure _that_ would work.” He is trembling—and in retrospect, the Doctor realises that he’s been doing that the entire time she’s been there.

It’s not quite enough to earn her sympathy. “Did you ever consider that it might have something to do with the wad of Cyber-consciousness you’ve been carrying around in your head since we last saw one another?” she says icily.

Now he’s actually angry. “Do you think that wasn’t the first thing I tried?” he demands. “I extracted the whole thing and booted it into a black hole, plus the pair of Cybermen I left Gallifrey with. I did all sorts of scans to confirm that there were no traces of Cyber- _anything_ left in me or in my TARDIS—hell, I nearly tore my TARDIS to pieces in the process. It didn’t help. It didn’t change anything.”

“So you think I’ll be the one to solve your little problem?” she asks, crossing her arms over her chest. “Why?”

“Because you’re…” It looks like it’s killing him to say the next words: “because you’re the smartest person I know.” He glares at her. “Happy?”

Maybe in another lifetime, that admission _would_ have made her happy, but they’re long past that now. “And what makes you think,” the Doctor says, even more coldly than before, as she leans over the table at him, “that I _want_ you to get a good night’s sleep?”

The Master’s upper lip curls into a snarl and he grabs her by the wrist. 

She gasps and, for a moment, doesn’t understand why. Some trick of his? Some restraint that the prison has to keep visitors safe?

No, the Doctor realises: she’s gasping, wide-eyed, because this is the first time she’s been touched in over twenty years.

Even though it’s him, even though his grip is tight enough to hurt, she still almost weeps for joy because she’s missed the touch of another person so badly.

She’s missed it so much that she almost breaks down and offers to give him whatever he wants.

Fortunately, the Master mistakes her reaction for something else, because he relaxes his hold and takes her hand in his. “Please,” he whispers. “You help people and I need help. I need _your_ help. I know I don’t deserve it, but… please.”

“You _don’t_ deserve it,” she agrees bluntly, but before she knows what she’s doing, she’s interlaced her fingers with his. 

“If you help me,” he offers, “I’ll find a way to break you out of here.”

She knows that his promises don’t mean anything, and that once he has what he wants he’ll leave her here to rot, but the Doctor still can’t bring herself to say no. If he’s gotten rid of the Cyberium and the rest of the Time Lords he converted into Cybermen, then the Master’s capacity for mayhem has been blunted at least a little bit—not that it’ll keep him from doing something _else,_ but there’s at least one threat out of the way. It doesn’t erase any of the monstrous things he’s done but, to her shame, it makes helping him a little more palatable. 

If she can convince him that she’s entirely dependent on him for escape, it’ll give her a slight advantage—and perhaps, if she can prolong things and keep him coming back, by the time he’s ready to betray her she’ll have thought of a way out on her own. 

But the real reason why she says yes is because she’s isolated and touch-starved, and if she does manage to draw this process out, then she’ll be able to get something that _she_ wants as well.

“All right,” the Doctor says. “It’s a deal.”

He looks relieved, which makes her a bit uncomfortable. “Thank you,” he whispers, which makes her even _more_ uncomfortable. 

“Don’t thank me yet,” she says hastily. Not quite ready to let go of his hand, she pulls the Master to his feet and leads him to the bed, where she sits cross-legged. “Lie down, head in my lap,” she orders.

The smirk is back. “Should I lie face—”

“Face _up,”_ the Doctor interrupts, rolling her eyes. 

“Just checking,” he teases. “I didn’t know what you had planned for me.”

“For all I know, you’ve tried _that_ already too,” she can’t help snarking as he follows her instructions and lies down. “Now, try to relax. I’ll be doing the usual and obviously it would be easier if you didn’t toss me out of your mind.”

“If it means I can sleep, I’ll roll out the red carpet for you." He starts to close his eyes but pauses to add, “Speaking of red, that jumpsuit you’re wearing really—”

“Not another word,” the Doctor says, putting a finger over his mouth. She quickly retracts her hand, though, when she feels the warmth of his breath on her skin.

Having him this close is dangerous, she thinks, and not for the usual murdery reasons.

“Relax,” she repeats, as much for her own benefit as for his. She places her fingers on his temples.

“Contact,” she whispers, reaching into his mind.

 _Contact,_ comes the reply.

She doesn’t sense any obvious psychic wounds, nor—as she had initially worried—does she hear the rhythm of the drums that tormented him for most of his life.

The Time Lords had hurt them both, she reflects grimly, and neither of them understood how or why until long after the damage was done.

 _Hadn’t thought of it like that,_ she hears him remark.

“You’re admitting that I’m right about something?” she murmurs. “You really _are_ being a gracious host, aren’t you?”

_Least I could do._

“No, the _least_ you could do is shush and let me work,” the Doctor retorts, but in truth she’s still trying to figure out what’s going on, let alone what she should do next.

_No need to be hesitant. It’s not like you can make things worse._

She isn’t thrilled at the way the Master keeps picking up on her other thoughts, but she’s pretty sure that she can still hide things from him if she needs to—and she definitely needs to.

It’s just irritating to be at risk when _she’s_ the one helping _him._

 _I’ve always been more talented than you in this area,_ he notes.

The fact that he’s right about that is even more irritating: the Doctor has always excelled at lateral thinking and problem solving and engineering fifteen different kinds of _something_ out of absolutely nothing, but the Master has always been a prodigy at anything psychic-related.

_Prodigy? I’m flattered._

“Shush,” she whispers, giving him a flick on the ear.

 _Well, stop thinking so loudly while you’re working,_ he grumbles.

She isn’t even sure if she _is_ working, because all she seems to be doing is wandering through his mind trying to see if there’s anything obviously wrong while he metaphorically follows her around looking over her shoulder.

“I’m going to have to go deeper,” she reluctantly says.

The Master doesn’t reply in words, but the Doctor can still sense his trepidation at the possibility of her getting access to more of his thoughts.

“Who am I going to tell?” she points out. “Besides, it’s not as if I _want_ to know all of your darkest secrets. Just…” She hesitates. “If possible, can you not show me what you did on Gallifrey?”

She really _really_ hopes that it isn’t the source of his insomnia. She has enough memories of her own destruction of Gallifrey at the end of the Time War (even if it hadn’t happened the way she originally thought); she doesn’t need any additional ones.

 _Deal,_ he agrees.

She takes a few tentative steps further into his mind and encounters no resistance. There are brief flashes of sounds and images—some memories, some hypothetical scenarios, some kaleidoscopic fragments of dreams—but nothing concrete enough to convey actual information. She could probably look closer if she put in the effort, but she’d really rather not.

(Besides, the Doctor thinks to herself in the most locked-away part of her mind, the less effort she expends, the longer this will take.)

She recognises a few things: the pastures near Mount Perdition where the Master grew up, the skies of Earth from the bridge of the _Valiant,_ the then-undamaged streets of the Citadel, the Vault at St Luke’s University, the interior of various TARDISes, the sight of war-torn Paris from the Eiffel Tower… 

It takes her a minute to realise why they’re all so familiar: they’re all memories of things the Doctor has witnessed as well. Places where, for good or for ill, they spent time together.

It’s the flashes of Gallifrey that hurt the most. Not because she knows that it’s all gone now, but because of who they both used to be when they were there.

She’s tired of mourning her friend over and over.

She hears a steady shushing sound, like waves lapping against the shore. Curiously, when she pulls back a little to get her bearings, the sound only grows louder.

The Doctor opens her eyes. “I heard a—” she begins, but falls silent when she discovers the source: the Master gently breathing in and out.

He’s asleep.

She breaks their mental connection carefully and, to her relief, he doesn’t wake up. 

The Doctor has no idea what she did to make this happen, but whatever it was, it worked.

The current question, of course, is what she should do now. She can’t easily move, not with his head still in her lap, but—foolish as it may be—she doesn’t really _want_ to move.

This is the closest they’ve been without trying to destroy one another, physically or psychologically, in a very long time.

So the Doctor begins absentmindedly playing with his hair, which is softer than she expected, and takes the opportunity to examine the rest of him. It’s easier with his eyes closed—when he’s awake, she’s usually too busy trying not to blink while they stare each other down. 

She likes this regeneration, she ultimately decides—aesthetically, at least. Granted, some of it is because when she first saw him, she hadn’t known that he was the Master, so she has some pleasant memories of that face. But the rest of it is… well, he’s not exactly _difficult_ to look at, and she decides to leave it at that and not indulge her curiosity over whether his beard is as soft as the hair on the top of his head.

His hands are rather nice-looking as well, the Doctor thinks, especially since they aren’t doing anything at the moment other than resting on his chest. Impulsively, she takes one of his hands in hers and is amused to discover that he apparently bites his nails and cuticles.

His fingers curl and she feels the faintest hint of a squeeze. Without entirely meaning to, she squeezes back and is once again relieved when he doesn’t wake up.

The Doctor isn’t sure how much time has passed since she arrived in this room—because she finally had something to do that _wasn’t_ obsessively keeping track of time—so she occupies herself by counting his breaths instead of the seconds or minutes.

After five hundred and eighty-seven breaths, a chiming sound comes from the ceiling, and she sees a symbol indicating that there are five minutes left.

When she glances back down at the head resting on her lap, the Master is awake and looking up at her.

“You’re welcome,” she says smugly, since she knows he’ll never be able to bring himself to actually thank her.

But instead of sitting up or at least returning to their usual banter, he just continues staring at the Doctor in something almost like wonder.

“What?” she demands. His expression is unnerving enough, even more so because they’re still very close to one another.

This is dangerous, but she can’t bring herself to push him out of her lap or move away.

There is a long silence before he answers: “You did it.”

“I’m just that brilliant,” she jokes. “Don’t forget to mail me a cake with a set of quantum lockpicks baked inside.”

He probably won’t help her escape, and she’s mentally kicking herself for letting him sleep at all, because if she’d given him hope rather than outright succeeding then he would have kept coming back.

Still, what’s done is done, and it hadn’t been a terrible way to spend the afternoon even if it was in the company of someone who hated her.

Although she really needs to remind herself of that last bit, because right now he isn’t looking at her with hatred in his eyes at all. She’s not sure what she's seeing there.

_Contact._

They’re sitting together, much as they are now: two boys sprawled out in a field of red grass, with one of them resting his head in the other’s lap.

“Wouldn’t be hard to swipe one,” one of them points out. “They leave them practically unguarded, especially the Type 40s.”

“Because they’re too busted up to function,” the other one objects. “It would fall apart around us the second we pulled the lever.”

“Nah, they’re sturdy. Built to last, that’s why they’re still around.”

“Come on, can’t we have _some_ standards? We could at least go with a Type 45.”

“If you can manage to hotwire one, but I bet you can’t,” the first one taunts. 

The other one makes a snort of disdain. “I can hotwire anything.”

“Oh yeah? Which one of us managed to get that warp drive running and which one of us ended up smelling like burnt hair?” He runs his fingers through the hair of the boy in his lap. “Still do, in fact.”

“It only worked for you because I stabilized it first!”

“Sure, keep telling yourself that,” he laughs.

“So let’s say we manage to steal one. Where would we go with it?”

There’s a pause while he thinks it over. “Everywhere,” he says at last. “We’d go everywhere. Every star, we’d see them together. You in?”

“I’m in,” the other one confirms with a grin. “The second we graduate from the Academy, we steal a TARDIS and head out.”

The Doctor blinks and the vision—memory, more accurately—fades.

“Thought I’d closed the psychic connection,” she says, unsettled.

“Was that your memory of us?” the Master asks; he sounds more confused than upset.

He’s not the only one who's confused. “It wasn’t yours?”

He shakes his head—which is when they both seem to realise that she’s still playing with his hair.

Feeling a little embarrassed, the Doctor moves her hand to her side, but when she tries to reposition the other one—the one holding his—he curls his fingers around hers and lifts it to his mouth, where he brushes his lips gently against the back of her hand.

Their eyes are still locked on one another, intense and fixated. She waits for the surprise, the double-cross, the sneer… but there’s nothing but the loudest silence she's ever heard.

He reaches up a hand towards her face—

The alarm chimes again, breaking the spell.

“One minute left,” the Doctor says, scrambling off the bed as quickly as possible and hoping that her cheeks aren’t as flushed as they feel. “If I’m late, it might get a tad grisly in here. First few days were a bit… zappy, though some of that was because of the very peculiar Judoonese dialect the guard was speaking—could have sworn she said ‘snack’ but apparently it was ‘stand still’ which turned out to be a hell of a misunderstanding to have right before supper…” She’s babbling, partly out of embarrassment but partly because if she doesn’t distract herself immediately she’ll remember that they aren’t touching anymore. It almost works, except that she can feel something under her skin crying out for just one more second of physical contact.

The arrows leading out of the room and back to her cell are shining like a beacon in a safe harbor.

“Remember what I said about the lockpicks,” she adds, then bolts into the corridor before the Master gets a chance to reply.

* * *

**Interlude #1:**

Now back to the daily monotony of her imprisonment, the Doctor has plenty of time to reexamine every second of that visit. She comes up with an extensive list of things she should have done, or shouldn’t have done, or maybe-should-not-have-done-but-maybe-should-have-done-anyway.

Just thinking about it is exhausting.

By the fifth day after the Master’s visit, the Doctor concludes that she shouldn’t have agreed to help him at all. If he wanted a psychic therapist so badly, there were probably millions out there who could rummage around in his memories until he fell asleep.

By the eighth day, she’s doubled down on that conclusion: she _definitely_ shouldn’t have helped him because this has to have been part of a larger plan. The Master is addicted to complicated schemes, yes, but even _he_ wouldn’t go to the trouble of—no, she still refuses to say the M-word—go to all the trouble of doing _that_ unless it was a necessary step in an outrageous plot to ruin something.

Though she doesn’t know what kind of advantage it would be to turn up somewhere claiming to be the Doctor’s—nope, not going to use that word either—claiming to have _that_ kind of connection to the Doctor, unless it was to specifically incur the wrath of someone like River Song.

She spends the ninth day worrying about River and the tenth day laughing at the utter hell the Master would have brought upon himself if that _had_ been part of his plan.

By the seventeenth day, she’s reconsidered her stance: chronic insomnia wouldn’t have slowed him down for long and at least this way she was able to find out a few useful things, such as the continued existence of the universe at large, the destruction of the Cyberium and everyone it had converted, and the fact that at least _one_ person knows she’s locked up in here.

By the nineteenth day, she grudgingly admits that it had also been nice to see a familiar face, even if it was _his_ face, and that the physical contact had probably done her some good, psychologically.

On the twenty-third day—in the middle of the night, to be precise—she even more grudgingly admits that after she returned to her cell that day, she found a strand of his hair on her jumpsuit and had saved it before repressing the entire shameful memory. She doesn’t confirm that it’s still on the windowsill until the twenty-fifth day.

By the thirtieth day, she’s in a panic again. This _has_ to be part of some plot, he’s played her somehow and she doesn’t know how or why, which means that she’s at a disadvantage. What opening did she give him? Was it the psychic connection? The physical contact? Letting him kiss her hand? Or had his attempt at reaching for her face been the real goal and she’d delayed him long enough to thwart it?

On the thirty-first day, with more reluctance than she cares to admit, the Doctor vaporises the strand of his hair by sticking it in the “bars” of her window. Just in case.

By the forty-eighth day, she’s run out of possible explanations for anything he’s done. Maybe it’s just the Master being his usual obsessively delusional self again, barging back into her life for a little attention and amusement. Maybe he never had insomnia at all.

By the fifty-third day, she’s annoyed, and then—by the fifty-fifth day— _furious_ with the sheer presumptuousness of the whole thing. He despises her—hasn’t he said that enough?—and his refusal to just leave her alone is extremely upsetting. She returns to being merely annoyed on the fifty-eighth day.

After going to bed on the seventy-second day, the Doctor considers the horrible possibility that there might be _another_ explanation for him begging for her help, letting her into his mind, falling asleep in her lap, reminding her of their childhood friendship, kissing her hand and trying to stroke her cheek while _staring_ at her like that, not to mention going to the trouble of acquiring documents stating that they were—no, the M-word is _still_ off-limits.

She doesn’t fall asleep that night.

The next night is when the dreams start.

If they were full of pain and hatred, that would be understandable, but they aren’t. Instead, they’re mundane in a way that would be hilarious if it had been anyone else and under any other circumstances: a combination of memory and hypothetical situations, where the two of them sit and talk about nothing of consequence. She initially worries that they’re not dreams at all, but some kind of psychic infiltration, but by the seventy-fifth day she concludes that they’re just dreams and that her subconscious is holding some kind of grudge against her.

When she wakes up on the eightieth day, the Doctor is completely sure that her subconscious hates her, because her most recent dream was of their first kiss.

She refuses to fall asleep the next night.

The ninetieth day since the Master’s visit is drawing near and her anxiety is growing. By the day—and soon, by the hour—she vacillates between hoping that he visits again—so that she can demand some answers/take a swing at him—and hoping that he _doesn’t_ come.

But on the afternoon of the ninetieth day, the symbol that flashes on her wall isn’t the usual one for her exercise period. It’s the pair of holding hands.

* * *

**Visit #2:**

“So what is it this time?” the Doctor asks as she enters the same room as before. “Allergies? Need a restaurant recommendation? The name of a good barber?”

She can’t help being a tiny bit amused when the Master self-consciously rubs at his beard. “It worked,” he begins, “for a few weeks, and then whatever you did wore off.”

“Come back for a top-up, then?” she scoffs, then sits down across from him and puts her feet up on the table. “I have bad news for you: I don’t know what I did. I just hung around in your thoughts until you started snoring.”

“Well, do it again,” he replies irritably.

The Doctor shakes her head. “Get me out of here first.”

“I can’t exactly come up with a jailbreak plan if I’m dead on my feet.”

“You’ve probably escaped from prisons while _actually_ dead,” she counters. “Think of this as incentive.”

“I need more time,” he insists.

“That’s why you have a TARDIS.” It’s only half a joke: for all she knows, the Master might have come here directly from his previous visit while she was stuck taking the slow path.

His irritation now just looks like sulking. “No, I mean I need more time _here._ Aside from the ninety minutes I spent in this room with you last time, my only other knowledge of this prison comes from the two-minute walk from the shuttle to this room. I don’t know it well enough to pinpoint any weaknesses.”

So he wasn’t able to land his TARDIS in the prison. Interesting, she thinks, but not useful quite yet. “You’ve made escapes with far less to work with,” she points out.

“Yes, but the main difference is that _this_ prison was built to hold a Time Lord. I need more than a handful of minutes if I’m going to come up with a plan.”

The Doctor is satisfied to hear the frustration in his voice, and even more satisfied to add to it. “Better get a shift on, then,” she remarks with a grin.

His response is an icy glare. “After you help _me._ Besides,” he adds, “you obviously know the layout and schedules here. That’s information I could use.”

“Then why didn’t you bother asking last time? Oh, that’s right,” she drawls sarcastically, “it’s because you were asleep! Convenient, isn’t it? And I’m sure we’ll have _plenty_ of time to talk today as well.”

The look on his face isn’t exactly _guilty,_ but it’s definitely a bit defensive. “You could have woken me up.”

“I’m not singing you lullabies for my own amusement.” The Doctor takes her feet off the table and sits up. “You said you’d help get me out of here. Give me a reason to believe you.”

“Fine,” the Master snaps. He pulls something from inside the sleeve of his coat and slides it across the table.

“How did you get this inside?” she asks, examining (but pointedly not touching) the tissue compression eliminator in front of her. 

“How do you think?” he replies. “I paid attention the last time I went through security and noticed their blind spots.”

“This room has to be monitored,” the Doctor points out. “They’re going to know that you brought this in.”

“Better get moving, then. There’s a platoon of Judoon guarding the shuttle bay.”

“And a whole host of automated security measures in between there and here,” she counters.

“Ooo, good point. Hostage-taking it is, then.”

Now she understands what he’s really after. “I’m not using this,” she said, indicating the TCE.

“Not even to secure your own freedom?” He pretends to look disappointed. “Doctor, this attempt at a moral high ground is just sad.” He sighs and gets to his feet. “Ah well. See you around—or not, apparently, since you’ll be stuck here forever.”

He heads to the door, but before he makes it that far, the Doctor’s temper gets the better of her and she hurls the TCE at him.

It strikes him in the center of his back and the Master whirls around to face her with a snarl. “That could have gone off, you know.”

She smirks. “I’m sure you build your toys better than that.”

“So we’re at an impasse.” He picks up the device and returns it to wherever it had been hiding up his sleeve. “If you want to be rescued in a way that you can stomach, then you’re going to have to give me time to work on it.” For one fleeting moment, he looks surprisingly vulnerable. “And since that means I’ll have to keep coming back here…”

The Doctor rolls her eyes. “Fine.” She points to the bed. “Lie down.”

“Aren’t you going to sit first?” he asks.

“You’re not cutting off circulation to my legs again.” Though in truth, it’s because she really doesn’t want a repeat of last time.

Or, perhaps, doesn’t want to find out if she _wants_ a repeat of last time.

However, she’ll probably still have to touch him in _some_ way, so after the Master removes his coat and lies back on the bed, she nudges him to scoot over so she can sit down beside him. “Close your eyes and shush,” she orders, then touches her fingers to the sides of his head. “Contact.”

_Contact._

It doesn’t last long, her attempt at wandering through his mind, for a rather awkward reason: the position she’s sitting in isn’t especially comfortable for an extended period. 

The solution the Doctor settles on is actually worse than the last time: she lies down next to him. “Roll onto your side, facing me,” she says.

To her annoyance, she notices the way that the corners of his mouth twitch into the hint of a smile as he complies.

It really is an awful idea, she knows, but at this point she can’t bring herself to back down.

Or at least that’s what she tells herself before gently resting her forehead against his. “Contact.”

_Contact._

Predictably, the Master can’t help teasing her about it. _Cozy, aren’t we?_

“Shush.”

 _What kind of shampoo do they give you here? It’s got a very interesting_ _scent._

Her face twists in irritation. “Stop _smelling_ me.”

_Kind of difficult to shut off an entire sense, you know._

“I’m sure you can manage it,” she says drily. “Or at least stop _talking_ about it.”

He continues to mock her: _Should we talk about something else then?_

“No.”

_How about the fact that I offered you an easy way out of this place and you were too squeamish to take me up on it?_

“It’s called ‘being a decent person,’” the Doctor counters. “You should try it sometime.”

She hears him make a snort of derision. _This prison is full of beings that you annihilate on a regular basis, and the Judoon aren’t much better. Besides, it’s not like anyone would ever know—well, except me. Your murderous rampage will be a very treasured memory, I promise._

She lets out a growl of annoyance. “Why are you always so hellbent on making me into a monster?”

_Because I know what’s lurking under that self-righteous exterior of yours, under all of your little rules—rules that someone else made but you’re still following even though there’s no one left to enforce them, and you don’t understand that you could just do whatever you wanted—_

“Stop,” she snaps, but something stirs in her mind: the echoes of a memory that she doesn’t want to remember, especially now, especially here.

_What are you hiding, Doctor?_

And before she can stop it, she’s _there:_ Bowie Base One, the first human colony on Mars, November 21st, 2059, and the infected water has given the Ice Warriors access to the base and its occupants and, if the Doctor can’t prevent it, the entire Earth as well.

But it’s a fixed point: even if they stop the Ice Warriors, Captain Adelaide Brooke and the rest of the colonists have to die in the process so that history can happen the way that it’s supposed to happen, because that’s how the Laws of Time work. But the Doctor can’t bring himself to leave; he’s part of events now, he doesn’t just abandon people to die, even though in this case he absolutely has to— 

“Oh, I liked this regeneration,” the Master remarks, which is when the Doctor (the one looking back on her past) realises that they’re both watching the memory unfold as silent and invisible witnesses. “The way that you _burned_ back then…”

“We’re not doing this,” she snaps. “Get out of my head.”

“You brought me here,” he counters. “Besides, it’s only fair: you were in my memories, now I get to have a little peek at yours.” He looks around at their surroundings: the aftermath of Ed blowing up the shuttle to prevent the Ice Warriors from reaching Earth but stranding all the remaining colonists on Mars in the process. “Why are you remembering this now, Doctor?”

“No idea,” she lies, because she does know the reason. She watches her past self argue with Adelaide, because he’s made a decision: he’s going to save them, history be damned, but the conditions are getting worse every second—oxygen is leaking and the environmental controls are down and his spacesuit is damaged and the water is dripping in through the ceiling and there just isn’t enough _time—_

And meanwhile Adelaide is arguing in favor of her own death, because the Doctor foolishly told her about the fixed point, but he can’t accept that, not now, not after entangling himself in these events and probably making everything worse by giving them all a little sliver of hope, which is why he’s getting angrier and angrier with each passing moment: at the Ice Warriors, at Adelaide, at the Laws of Time, and most of all at himself— 

And something inside of him _snaps._

This is why she can’t have the Master here, watching _this_ memory, because after Adelaide once again reminds him of what he told her, the Doctor’s mouth opens and the snapped thing inside of him comes roaring out: “Yes, because there are laws: there are Laws of Time. Once upon a time there were people in charge of those laws, but they died. They all died!”

The Doctor (her current self) is now actively trying to throw the Master out of her mind, but he’s resisting and it’s obvious that he’s so eager to know what’s about to happen, because his eyes are practically glowing with anticipation.

“Do you know who that leaves? Me!” her former self shouts. “It’s taken me all these years to realise—”

She can’t get the Master out in time.

Her past self’s expression twists into something terrible. “The Laws of Time are mine and _they will obey me!”_

The Master’s surprise and glee at hearing his own words from the Doctor’s mouth is what finally gives her enough of an opening to shove him out of this memory.

But not far enough: it’s still November 21st, 2059, but they’re on Earth, outside an unassuming row of Georgian-style houses while snow falls around them. Captain Adelaide Brooke stares in shock at her own home, the one that she wasn’t supposed to return to because she was supposed to die on Mars. 

And the Doctor, her past self, doesn’t notice that Adelaide’s horrified by it—no, that’s not true. The Doctor notices, he just doesn’t care. 

He’s too caught up in his triumph, too busy realising that there’s a whole new path he could walk if he wanted to, because he just took his first steps down it. “For a long time now,” he said, “I thought I was just a survivor, but I’m not… I’m the winner. _That’s_ who I am: the Time Lord Victorious.”

She can’t bring herself to look at the Master but she can hear his gasp of delight.

“And there’s no one to stop you,” Adelaide says bitterly.

Something in the Doctor’s expression locks into place as he replies: “No.”

Watching her past self from the outside, knowing everything that’s going on behind those eyes, is agony. It doesn’t matter that Adelaide goes inside and shoots herself, keeping the fixed point in time intact and demonstrating that he had gone too far: this was the closest the Doctor had come in so long to being completely unmade.

Reliving this memory, after years in prison with nothing but doubts because her life wasn’t what she thought it had been, is an even worse torture. 

“Wait,” the Master says, freezing the scene before the brokenhearted Doctor can return to his TARDIS. “Wait. Go back.”

“Absolutely not,” she snaps, but before she can prevent it, the memory rewinds to her past self declaring himself the Time Lord Victorious and arguing with Adelaide, who flees back inside— 

But then the events change: the Doctor watches her previous regeneration storm into the house and wrest the gun from Adelaide’s hand, alter her memory while the captain pleads with him—like Donna had begged him, only worse—and then head back to his TARDIS with a satisfied smirk on his face.

“Whatever you’re doing—” she warns the Master.

“Shh,” he says softly, observing this warped recollection with a look of wonder, “I want to see what happens.”

She’s thought about it before: what would have happened if she hadn’t been stopped, but the Master is able to add even more details and even more horrors, because he was there for what happened next.

The Master—his former regeneration—is raised from the dead by those cultists, only in this version of events the Doctor is there too: welcoming him back to life, preventing Lucy from delivering the injuries that burned the Master up inside, and then helping him because this alternate version of the Doctor finally understood that there was no one out there to stop them and that they could do whatever they wanted.

Then they’re face to face with Rassilon and the rest of the High Council, who are trying to flee the end of the Time War by exploiting the Master’s madness, and this time the Doctor doesn’t need to find a third option because there isn’t a shred of doubt about which one of them he will side with. 

“Choose your enemy well,” Rassilon warns the Doctor. “We are many, the Master is but one.”

This version of the Doctor—or maybe he isn’t the Doctor anymore, maybe he’s something else now—bares his teeth in an expression that is almost a smile. “But he’s the one that’s important,” he says, pulling the trigger and silencing Rassilon forever.

And then there truly is no one to stop them. The whole of time and space is out there, waiting for the last two Time Lords to do with it as they will, star by pitiful star.

The Doctor—the real one, the one whose memories are being retold as a twisted parody—turns to face the Master—the real one, the one who is conjuring up this horror story. “So that’s your happy ending, then?” she demands. 

Unsurprisingly, he looks smug. “‘Homicidal maniac’ looks even better on you than I thought it would.”

“One snag in your little fantasy, though,” she snaps. “That Timeless Child revelation didn’t exactly make you a fan of mine, did it? What would you have done then?”

The fact that his smile grows wider _is_ a surprise, though. “Even better,” he says, seeming to savor the words. “We could have destroyed Gallifrey together.”

The snow falling around them turns into ash and the Doctor realises what memory they’re about to relive.

So, just as she did while trying to escape the Matrix when she was last on Gallifrey, she hits the Master with everything she’s got.

Her eyes fly open and she flinches so violently at the sight of his face directly in front of hers that she nearly falls off the bed.

But his eyes are closed. Apparently she knocked him out cold.

Still, she should get up and get as far away from him as she possibly can. The Doctor rolls over— 

—and is stopped by the Master putting his arms around her waist with a sleepy murmur. He’s still unconscious and hasn’t pinned her in place, but they’re definitely spooning now and she’s not sure she can deal with this on top of everything else.

Only she can’t pry herself away because she realises that she’s trembling—quite violently, in fact. She knows that it’s emotional exhaustion and trauma—reliving one of her worst memories and then reliving it _again_ only worse—that’s left her beyond shaken. And the thing she wants more than anything right now is to be held by someone, but unfortunately she has only one option.

So she takes what she can get: the Doctor closes her eyes, lets the Master pull her a little closer, and shudders while trying not to imagine the nightmare he apparently wishes was hiding under her skin.


	2. Those Seconds Slipping By

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _We slip a little bit every time we meet_   
>  _We’re both awaiting orders from above_

**Interlude #2**

The Doctor counts the days afterwards automatically, almost numbly. 

Her sleep gets worse: she keeps dreaming of past versions of herself laughing in a way that she has never laughed, and most of the time it’s accompanied by the sound of him laughing along with her. She can never tell what they’re doing to elicit that reaction but is pretty sure that she doesn’t want to know.

It takes her until the fifty-ninth day to understand what’s shaken her the most: ever since she learned about the Timeless Child and how much of her life had been stolen, she keeps coming back to the same question, over and over: if she isn’t who she thought she was, then who is she?

Not just that: what kind of person _was_ she, back during all those lives that she can’t remember? She’s met the regeneration that was disguised as a human named Ruth—she _liked_ Ruth—but she also knows that Ruth had once worked for the Division… which is not something the Doctor can see herself doing: clandestinely _enforcing_ the will of the Founders and whoever their successors were. 

She’s never liked orders or rules.

But maybe that’s why she’s still reeling from the Master’s last visit: maybe ‘the Doctor’ is just an act, nothing but a costume put on by the unknown person that she used to be. Maybe that incident with the Ice Warriors was a return to form, a reversion to her real self.

Which, she thinks ruefully, would be rather ironic if _that_ version of her is the one that the Master prefers.

When she falls asleep at night, she wraps her arms around herself and tries to pretend that they belong to someone else— _anyone_ else.

It doesn’t work.

Ninety days pass. The flashing symbol on the wall that afternoon is once again the pair of hands. ****

* * *

**Visit #3**

This time, the Master’s lying on the bed when the Doctor arrives.

It’s been ninety days and she still has no idea what to say.

Fortunately, he does, and also manages to sidestep the potential awkwardness. “Did you see a bright flash of light out your window since I was last here?” he asks. “Or hear something very loud, like thunder?”

“I have,” she says. It had woken her up in the middle of the night. “That was you, then?”

“When did you hear it?”

The Doctor thinks back. “Seven nights ago.”

He grimaces. “Thought as much. I set that off three days after I left. Confirms a theory I had, at least.”

She sees what he’s getting at. “There’s a temporal field around the prison.”

“About an eighty day gap, apparently. Not a bad trick: someone tries to blow a hole in the wall, they’ll know about it weeks in advance.”

“And it explains why you can’t land your TARDIS here. Too much distortion,” she says grimly. “So that’s three possible methods of escape down.”

“Only nine hundred billion more to go.” The Master pushes himself up onto his elbows to look at her directly. “I thought it might count as a show of good faith.”

“Here for your regularly scheduled exorcism-slash-nap, then?”

One side of his mouth twitches in a smile. “It would be awfully kind of you.”

“Yeah,” the Doctor remarks, “it would be, wouldn’t it?” She waits just long enough for him to look apprehensive before joining him on the bed, lying on her side facing him. “No writing fanfiction of my memories this time,” she orders.

“Fine,” he sighs petulantly.

Closing her eyes, she touches her forehead to his. “Contact.”

 _Contact. Something more pleasant this time?_ the Master suggests.

“It doesn’t have to be memories,” she notes. “In fact, I could just do what I did last time and psychically punch you in the face.”

_Hard pass on that option: I had a headache for days after._

“Good.” It had given her a headache as well, but he doesn’t have to know that. She tries to do what she did the first time he visited—go deeper into his thoughts and wander around until he falls asleep—but the hints of memories keep flickering in every corner, constantly on the verge of blooming into something more elaborate. “Could you try thinking of something a bit dull?”

_Nothing in my life is dull._

“You spent years in the Australian Outback,” she points out.

_So did you, unless you were lying about that. Something about ‘great rocks,’ if I recall._

“Does your TARDIS still look like a cabin, by the way?” she can’t help asking. “I could never figure out if the chameleon circuit was broken or if you just preferred it like that.”

_It’s still on Gallifrey. I didn’t have time to get back to it, so I took the first one I could find._

Thinking back to their last confrontation on Gallifrey, the Doctor remembers now that there was a TARDIS in the Matrix chamber. She wonders if, on a subconscious level, she had always known that he would survive that encounter. 

She wonders if that’s what caused her to consider using the Death Particle to begin with.

The risk of reliving that memory is too high, so the Doctor shoves that particular train of thought as far into the back of her mind as she can and then changes the subject: “What does this new one look like?”

_The chameleon circuit was damaged so the outside is the usual grey column, but the interior is a cabin… in places._

“What do you mean?”

 _I mentioned before that I nearly tore my TARDIS apart to find anything that could have caused my insomnia,_ he explains. _The ‘tearing apart’ was more literal than figurative._

Now in his memories, the Doctor sees that the Master is right that it’s only a cabin _“in places.”_ It looks a bit like a haunted house: shadows that don’t have any source writhing on the walls and floors, corners that spiral in on themselves, and something glitching in the window panes. 

“And you call _my_ TARDIS a wreck,” she mutters.

_It works, more or less, it’s just not fit for company. I’ll get around to fixing it eventually._

She examines the interior more closely. “Seems like your architectural reconfiguration stabilizers are completely knackered. It’s starting to look like an Escher painting in here.”

He makes a tiny noise of offense. _Might I remind you which one of us was put to work repairing the other one’s TARDIS because it was held together with paste and string?_

“My TARDIS is _not_ held together with paste and string!” she protests.

Two different voices—but not different people—take over the argument: “When was the last time you cleaned out the temporal transformer conduits?” Missy demands. 

“I don’t keep a log,” the Doctor—her last regeneration—grumbles. “I clean them when they need cleaning.”

“You obviously _don’t,_ unless you think ‘hoping that a large enough piece of compressed baryonic matter shoves the other clogs out of the way’ counts as ‘cleaning.’”

They’re in the Vault, having just returned from an afternoon (and most of an evening) tinkering around in the TARDIS. Missy had been going stir-crazy and—even though he wouldn’t admit it out loud—the Doctor needed an extra hand performing maintenance. Plus, it had been helpful to have a fresh pair of eyes survey the TARDIS’s systems—or, rather, a fresh pair of eyes who actually had experience operating a TARDIS.

“I suppose this counts as ‘dull,’” the Master remarks, watching the memory of their past selves. “Funny how we’ve swapped roles now.”

“You’re not guarding me,” the Doctor corrects him, “and you’re certainly not trying to teach me how to be _anything,_ let alone ‘good.’”

“The bickering was nice,” he says wistfully. “Like an old married co—”

“Do _not_ finish that sentence unless you want another mental pummelling,” the Doctor warns him.

She has to admit, though, it _is_ nice watching their past selves have something close to a normal conversation. Those years weren’t the most interesting of her life, since she was stuck in one spot for several decades, but they had been comfortable in an odd sort of way. Missy had been easy to talk to—and the Doctor now realises that it was probably intentional: being imprisoned, with only a single visitor, meant that Missy had to weigh her words and actions carefully to ensure that the Doctor kept coming back.

The parallels to their current circumstances are a bit disturbing. 

Eventually, after a little more back and forth, the Doctor (the former version) leaves the Vault. 

“So what did you get up to when I wasn’t around?” the current Doctor wonders.

“Nothing much,” the Master replies. “Slept, mostly.” In fact, as he speaks Missy heads towards the corner of the Vault that served as her bedroom.

“Really?”

Unexpectedly, he looks a little cagey. “Really. Now let’s go.”

“Why are you in such a rush?” the Doctor asks, blocking his path to the door. 

“No reason.”

He’s visibly uncomfortable, which makes her immediately suspicious. “There’s obviously a reason. You’re never in a rush normally.”

She hears something from Missy’s location: a low breathy sound. 

“What are you up to?” the Doctor says, going to take a look at the Master’s past self— 

Who is presently _very_ occupied… with herself… so to speak.

The Doctor makes a startled noise, a u-turn, and a beeline back to where the Master is waiting by the door of the Vault.

“Got an eyeful, then?” he says, sounding a bit awkward.

“More than an eyeful,” she admits, feeling her cheeks redden in embarrassment. “So… not always _sleeping,_ then.” 

He looks a bit indignant. “I was stuck in here for over seventy years! It’s not like I was reading novels the whole time.”

Now that the initial surprise has worn off, she starts cackling. “I cannot _believe_ that you—”

But her laughter is halted by the sound of Missy gasping something more specific: “Doctor…”

The Doctor’s jaw drops as she stares at the Master. “You _didn’t.”_

“Seventy. _Years,”_ he repeats through gritted teeth. “Be flattered that it was your name I was moaning and not Nardole’s.”

“You’re not always doing this, are you?”

“I have to _eat_ occasionally,” he replies drily.

“No, I mean, you’re not always thinking about _me_ while—”

“Of course not,” he says hastily, but the scene shifts to what looks like a subterranean bunker populated by a handful of soldiers.

And speaking of handful—

 _“Let’s move along,”_ the Master says, doing his best to block the sight of his latest regeneration lying on one of the nearby cots.

To the Doctor’s relief—and, judging by his mortified expression, the Master as well—they’re in a new location.

“I’m going to tease you about this forever, you know.” She wrinkles her nose. “Assuming I can banish that last image from my mind, of course.”

“Didn’t appreciate the view?” he teases.

“Didn’t appreciate the _uniform,”_ she retorts a bit icily. “Where are we now?” It’s not a place she recognises: a Victorian courtyard garden with a neatly trimmed lawn and a fountain in the center. 

Rising from her seat on the edge of the fountain, is Missy: “Hello!” she calls to a figure that is _also_ familiar— 

“Hang on,” the Doctor says, puzzled at the sight of the strange clockwork man with half a face standing under the colonnade. “I fought him on a balloon once—well, it was an Italian restaurant that turned into a balloon because there was a—never mind. How did _you_ meet him?”

“You meet all sorts of people in heaven,” the Master remarks, looking amused.

“Didn’t know droids qualified for the afterlife.”

The droid in question appears equally perplexed, especially when the Time Lady introduces herself: “I’m Missy. You made it!”

This is from when Missy was collecting human minds for her 3W project, the Doctor realises. But why is the Master showing her this memory? And is he doing it on purpose or on accident?

His past self gazes at the half-faced man sympathetically and joins him. “I hope my boyfriend wasn’t too mean to you.”

 _“‘Boyfriend’?”_ the Doctor repeats incredulously.

“Now,” Missy continues, helping the droid sit down and taking a seat in the chair next to him, “did he push you out of that thing, or did you fall? Couldn’t really tell. He can be _very_ mean sometimes.” She smiles and pats his hand. “Except to me, of course, because he loves me so much… I do like his new accent, though. Think I might keep it.”

“Wait,” the Doctor says, even more bewildered than before, “were you _faking_ that accent?”

“Was I?” the Master asks, raising his eyebrows in pretend astonishment.

“Never mind, that’s not the point,” she groans. “Is this what you were telling everyone? That we were in a _relationship?”_

“Aren’t we?” Without their attention to sustain the memory, Missy and the half-faced man vanish, though the garden remains.

The Doctor, meanwhile, is still trying to grapple with this new information. “And the first thing you did when those regenerations met was snog me senseless…”

“I was a very naughty girl back then,” he confirms with a smirk.

“For someone who despises me,” the Doctor says, “you’re awfully keen to pretend that we’re romantically involved. Why?”

“What, you don’t think you’re attractive? You should have a bit more confidence in yourself, Doctor.”

He’s teasing her, which confirms her suspicion that she’s getting close to something resembling the truth.

“Not just attraction,” she counters. _“Involved._ Committed. You’re…” The penny drops: she understands now. “Oh.”

The Master’s still smirking but there’s a touch of bitterness to it now. “You’re not saying it yourself since you don’t want to sound like you’re bragging, so I’ll say it for you: you think it’s because so few people measure up to your ridiculously high standards that anyone who would actually be your girlfriend, or boyfriend, or _husband—”_

The Doctor does her best to not flinch at that last term.

“—they would have to be someone pretty special, wouldn’t they?” he finishes. “Is that what you think this is really about?”

“Yes, actually,” she snaps impatiently, “that’s _exactly_ what I think it is. You’re obsessed with being better than I am, and since you can’t find a way to break me down you’ve settled for staking some kind of _claim_ on me instead.”

That’s what drove the Master mad about the Timeless Child revelation, she realises: not because she was so “special,” but because he _wasn’t._

Or at least he doesn’t believe that he’s special.

“Oh please,” he sneers. “Do you really think you uncovered some deep dark secret about me? All you’ve seen here is what I’ve _allowed_ you to see. How well do you think you understand me when half the time you don’t even recognise me? I’ve been fooling you for centuries with paper-thin disguises and you think that you _know_ me?” He laughs at her and lies down on the grass. “I’m ready for my nap now. Switch off the lights on your way out.”

The Doctor can’t resist trolling him just a little, so she leans over and asks “What, you don’t want a goodnight kiss?”

Her taunting turns into a startled yelp when the Master grabs her hand and pulls her down next to him. “And what if I did?” he whispers.

Calling his bluff is risky—it’s actually what led to their first kiss when they were young—but she refuses to back down. “Come and get it, then,” she replies mockingly.

He leans in, as expected, but she jumps out of his mind before he can make contact.

Except that he hadn’t just leaned in for a kiss in his mind: he’s kissing her in real life as well.

Yet _another_ kind of physical contact she hasn’t experienced in over twenty years.

It’s momentary, though, because he actually _is_ asleep now. The Doctor repositions herself so that their faces are no longer touching, and in response the Master snuggles up next to her, resting his head on her shoulder.

She tries not to think too much about the topic of attraction, but ends up considering it anyway. It’s not a surprise revelation that he’s attracted to her—she’s known that for a very long time, it’s usually mutual, and neither of them are particularly good at hiding it even when they’re at one another’s throats (in fact, she has a very strong suspicion that when his “Saxon” regeneration used that Lazarus technology to artificially age her past self, it wasn’t an attack on the Doctor’s vanity so much as the Master trying to put some distance between them while he held the Doctor captive). 

So one of her theories after his first visit might have some truth to it: that behind whatever nefarious scheme he’s planning (because he’s obviously planning something, he’s incapable of _not_ planning something), the Master is also visiting her because, well, he wants to be around her, and even he isn’t sure what exactly that means.

It’s dangerous for both of them: he’s not used to being so close to her—especially one-on-one—and she’s not used to relying on him for anything, even if it’s just company in this case. A few missteps and this could get very messy indeed.

On the other hand, what else did she have to occupy herself with these days? There might come a time when she’s so lonely and bored that “messy” would be a welcome change.

But before she can come to any kind of conclusion on the matter, she falls asleep.

When the Doctor wakes to the chime of the five-minute warning, they’re both in the same position as before, and it feels so horribly _comfortable_ that she’s not sure whether to run screaming or savor the moment for as long as she can. 

“Good morning,” he murmurs, and the warmth of his breath on the base of her neck is enough to make her shiver. 

“It’s late afternoon,” she points out.

“We’re time travellers,” he scoffs. “It’s whatever time we want it to be.”

“Except that you’re the only one doing any actual travelling,” the Doctor says coldly, grateful for an excuse to sit up and move away from him. 

He’s silent for a moment. This obviously wasn’t the reaction he’d hoped for from her. “Say,” the Master begins, “if I break you out of here—”

 _“When_ you break me out of here,” she corrects him.

 _“—when_ I break you out of here, where are you going to go?”

“Back to the usual,” she replies carefully. “Travelling. Helping out where I can. All the things you’re not particularly keen on.”

He’s silent again and it’s making her increasingly nervous. “You were going to invite him along, weren’t you,” he says quietly.

“Who?”

He doesn’t look at her. “O. After the mess with Barton and the Kasaavin was over, you were going to ask him to travel with you.”

For a brief second, she wants to deny it, but doesn’t see the point. “Yes,” she admits. “I liked O. I wanted to get to know him better.”

“I considered it, you know,” the Master says, getting to his feet. “Scrapping the original plan and keeping my cover. I thought it might be fun to see how close I could get to you before you figured it out.”

“How close were you hoping to get?” she can’t resist asking. 

He doesn’t answer in words, but his eyes momentarily glance in the direction of the bed.

“Pretending to be human for that long?” The Doctor laughs ruefully. “That’s commitment.”

“I suspect it wouldn’t have been as long of a time as you think,” he counters, then makes a snort of amusement. “I know how you get about humans sometimes.”

“So you thought you’d, what, get to skip the foreplay or something?” she jokes.

He smirks, but his gaze is more intense than she expected, which freezes her in place long enough for him to close the distance between them and grab her hand.

_Contact._

They’re in her TARDIS and all the sensors are lit up and the Cloister Bell is ringing like mad. It takes her a moment to understand that this isn’t a memory, but a story.

“Here’s how I picture it,” the Master says. He’s dressed like he was when she saw him in the Outback: a light blue button-up shirt under a khaki vest, a clean-shaven chin, and neatly-combed hair. He looks years younger—obviously, because he’s pretending to be a human in his 30s, not a Time Lord who’s really thousands of years old. “We’re dealing with one of the usual pests—let’s go with Daleks this time—and everything’s going predictably haywire.”

On cue, one section of the console erupts in a shower of sparks and acrid-smelling smoke. “Doctor, you’d better come take a look at this!” the Master—O, more accurately—calls out. His worried expression shifts back to the Master’s more taunting one. “Come on, play along,” he encourages her.

“Fine,” the Doctor sighs. She joins him at the controls and examines them. “Oh dear,” she murmurs with a frown.

“Yes dear?” When the Doctor gives him a puzzled look, he explains. “Ah, should have mentioned that: in this version of the story, we have this whole running joke because my name is O and—”

“All right, all right, I get it,” the Doctor groans, then turns her attention back to the TARDIS console. “They’ve phased through the backup heliwave shielding… if we don’t find a way to get the primary shields back online, they’ll get access to the station’s mainframe and turn everyone inside to carp.” She squints at the display. “Carp?”

“Whoops, typo,” the Master says cheerfully. “I meant ‘corpses.’”

He's joking—mental constructs don’t work like that unless they’re very unstable. 

Meanwhile, O is working on something at another section of the controls. “Is it just the two of us?” the Doctor asks.

“Your other pets suffered a variety of unfortunate mishaps after I came on board.” He smirks. “Purely accidental, of course.”

“No. Not happening,” she replies firmly. “Try again.”

The Master rolls his eyes. “Fine.”

“Doctor!” Ryan calls from just outside the control room. “Graham’s gotten stuck under something heavy!”

“We’ll be back after we’ve lifted it off of him!” Yaz adds. The Doctor hears them run further into the TARDIS.

“Happy?” the Master demands, then goes back to playing O: “Doctor,” he says eagerly, “what was it you said earlier about the sonic barrier nets that the TARDIS got caught in when we tried to land on the station?”

“Obviously I don’t know,” she replies testily, “since you didn’t send me a script for this fantasy—oh!” Her eyes widen as the solution becomes apparent.

“That’s my name!” he laughs. 

“The nets run around the whole circumference of the station,” the Doctor says, checking the TARDIS sensors to confirm. “If we reverse the polarity, it’ll bounce the Dalek ships right off them—not to mention deliver a nasty shock in the process.”

“Is it possible to reverse it from here?”

She shakes her head. “No, but we could get close enough to one of the transmitters to splice in a relay signal. Though one of us would have to stick their head out the door in order to reach it.”

“I’ll do it,” O volunteers, grabbing the cable connected to the winch next to the TARDIS doors. “If something goes wrong, better to have you at the controls than me.”

The Doctor nods. “True, we don’t want a repeat of that mess on Rydex IX.” It’s only fair for her to get some ad libbing in as well, she thinks.

“That’s only because _you_ got distracted by the Auton pretending to be the King of All Fetched Hours!” he protests. “I was piloting the TARDIS perfectly well until he set off those nanocannons.”

 _“I_ was the one distracting _him!”_ She has to admit, this is actually kind of fun—plus, it’s nice to be back with her TARDIS, even an imaginary one. “All right, I’m in position and have extended the TARDIS’s shields, so you should have oxygen while you work.”

“And here I thought I was going to have to hold my breath,” he snarks.

“I’ll hold it for you,” the Doctor says with a smile.

“Only till I get back, alright?” After securing the cable around his waist, he opens the door and starts untangling the wires to establish the relay link.

“Anyway,” the Master says while he works, “we’d have a bit more flirtatious banter, and then just as I finished up—”

An explosion rocks the TARDIS, knocking the Doctor off her feet and O out of the TARDIS.

He’s still attached by the cable, but when the Doctor stands up again she can see how it’s straining under the weight. Panicked, she scrambles to the door and starts pulling him in.

“Are you all right?” she asks once O’s back inside. Even small periods in vacuum could spell trouble for humans.

“I’m okay,” he promises, but his knees are still shaky so she has him wrapped in her arms. “I swear.” He smiles, and even though she knows who he really is, it’s shy and sweet enough for the Doctor to pretend that he’s someone else.

“And that’s when it happens again,” the Master tells her, putting his arms around her waist. “That feeling you haven’t been able to pin down: like you’ve known me your whole life. Combine that with physical proximity and a rush of adrenaline…” He leans in, lips parting—

The one-minute alarm goes off, jolting both of them into the present moment, where they’re standing with their arms around each other.

“Not a bad story,” the Doctor says a little breathlessly. “Bit contrived, though.”

“I’ll come up with a better one for next time,” the Master assures her.

“You’d better.” She steps out of his arms and tries to ignore the glow that the words _“next time”_ elicit in her. 

On the walk back to her cell, the Doctor realises that she’s actually looking forward to it.

* * *

**Visits #4-#12**

Every visit, she looks forward to the next one just a little bit more. 

It’s incredibly dangerous. She’s already at an inherent disadvantage due to her circumstances, and this feels far too much like giving him more power—and she _knows_ what he’s like when he gets a taste of power. 

But to some extent, she’s getting what she originally wanted out of this: the other eighty-nine days of her life are lonely, and on the ninetieth day they’re not. The other eighty-nine days, her skin feels like it’s starving, and on the ninetieth day it doesn’t because she’s touching him almost the entire time he’s there: holding his hand, playing with his hair while he sleeps, and curling up next to him while they tell each other stories or remember happier times or strategise over how to get her out of this place.

It’s the times when they pretend to be on the TARDIS that are the best, as well as the most dangerous. He’s her window to the rest of the universe, and as time passes the line between “him” and “freedom” becomes increasingly blurred. 

They’re hurtling towards a breaking point and she doesn’t know how to stop it, or if she wants to stop at all.

* * *

**Interlude #12**

She’s dreaming of Gallifrey, of the last time she saw it, the last time she’ll ever see it because it’s gone now, all gone…

But in her dream, it’s still there. She’s not on Gallifrey itself, but she can see the Citadel shining on the other side of the Boundary, because in this dream the Master had lied to her: he didn’t destroy Gallifrey at all. It was one of his little tricks, just a ruse to lure her there so that he could show her his real plan.

“Take my hand,” he says, extending it to her, just like he did in her memory before she rejected it.

But in the dream she does take his hand and notices that he’s holding a strip of cloth about a foot long.

“Really?” she asks incredulously. “Everything’s falling apart and you want to do this _now?”_

“What other chance will we get?” the Master asks. “Ko Sharmus is going to set off the Death Particle any minute now—”

She nods, realising he’s right. “So it’ll have to be the quick version then.” She wraps one end of the cloth around her hand while he does the same with the other end. “Ready?” she asks the three humans standing nearby.

Ryan, Yaz, and Graham exchange an uneasy look. “Are we meant to be here for this?” Yaz asks.

“Of course you are,” the Doctor reassures her. “You’re my fam, you’ve _got_ to be here. Now just say what I told you.”

“All right,” Yaz says. “I consent and gladly give.”

“Ryan?” the Doctor prompts.

He hesitates. “And you’re _sure_ you want to do this?”

“Yes!” she replies impatiently.

“Fine: I consent and gladly give.”

“And Graham?”

“I dunno, Doc, he’s not exactly who I’d pick.”

“Then be thankful that it’s not _you_ over here with me,” the Master snaps. “Can we hurry this along?”

“Come on, Graham,” the Doctor urges gently.

Graham sighs. “Yeah, alright: I consent and gladly give.”

She turns back to face the Master and looks down at their hands and the cloth joining them together. “Our turn to say something, then.” She had a speech planned, a really good one, but right now she’s so nervous that she can’t recall a word of it, so she goes with the words that she _can_ think of, even if they’re not really standard for a ceremony like this: “Without hope.”

“Without hope,” he repeats.

“Without witness,” she continues.

“Without witness.” 

Neither of them can look away and she’s never felt so solid and grounded in her life. “Without reward.”

“Without reward,” he echoes.

Then it’s complete. They did it.

“Only one thing left to do,” the Master says. With his free hand, he tilts her chin slightly and kisses her.

When their lips finally part, she realises how happy she is… but she also knows that it can’t last.

So she might as well say it outright.

“Master,” she murmurs.

“Yes?” Judging by his expression, he knows what she’s going to say and is trying not to do anything to make her lose her nerve.

“I—”

But it’s too late: the Death Particle detonates and everything turns to ash.

The Doctor wakes up in her cell and stares at the ceiling for the rest of the night.

The ninetieth day arrives… and the symbol is the same one she sees on the other eighty-nine days: a figure doing star jumps. Exercise time.

He didn’t come. She doesn’t know what to feel about that. Relieved? Upset? Devastated? Happy? Maybe all of them at once.

On the ninety _-first_ day, however, the symbol changes to the pair of holding hands.

* * *

**Visit #13**

The Master’s waiting for her just inside the door, which gives the Doctor the perfect opportunity to shove him against the nearest wall as hard as she can.

“If you come here late again, don’t bother coming at all,” she growls, pressing her forearm across his neck to pin him in place.

“I take it you’re upset,” he wheezes.

“You have a _time machine,_ you’ve got no excuse, so I can only assume that you did it on purpose.” She puts a little more pressure on his throat. _“Do not_ play these games with me, do you understand?”

He tries to squirm out from where she’s got him trapped, but there’s only so much he can do without choking himself further. “You’re not in a position to make demands, Doctor.”

“Oh, I very much am,” she hisses. “What’s the worst that can happen to me? You stop visiting? I’ve just spent the last two decades completely alone. But you?” She grins, though it feels more like baring her teeth than an actual smile. “You’ll have some long sleepless nights in your future, won’t you?”

She’s angry—angrier than she expected, given how wary she’s been about him visiting her at all, but after this many times she expected that he would continue as usual and is upset that he decided to toy with her instead. Not just that: she feels robbed of something she’s entitled to, which is not a pleasant realisation. The Doctor doesn’t think of herself as a particularly possessive person—that’s more the Master’s schtick—but his attention was _hers_ and the idea that he could casually take it away feels less like an insult and more like an _injustice._

So that’s a rather disturbing development.

Even more disturbing is the sudden and very acute knowledge of how much of her is pressed against him and how strangely comfortable it is—though probably not especially comfortable for him, given the whole strangulation aspect of his position. 

Speaking of which: “Is the plan to just asphyxiate me until I pass out?” he coughs.

For a moment, she wants to say yes, but she’s already walking a very dangerous line and there is every possibility that she might actually do it. She backs off a little, removing most of her weight from his throat, but still does her best to convey that moving wouldn’t be in his best interest.

Not that he couldn’t break free if he wanted to. She wonders what would happen if he tried: it’s been a long time since they’ve had a genuine knock-down drag-out fight.

They’ve been very careful around one another for the last few visits: nothing too cruel or (intentionally) painful, nothing that would bring them too close to a breaking point.

But now there’s no avoiding it.

_Contact._

They’re back on the Eiffel Tower, only in a confusing turn of events, she’s the one with a hand around his throat instead of the other way around.

To the Doctor's relief, she’s not in the Nazi uniform the Master was wearing at the time.

“I still can’t believe you sided with them,” she snaps. 

She’s practically pushing him over the railing, but he doesn’t seem especially concerned. “I wasn’t going to stomp around occupied Paris without _minions,”_ he protests with a look of annoyance.

“It was a new low, even for you,” she counters.

“Interesting that you’re more upset about this than you are about the genocide I _did_ commit.”

She feels her fingers tighten. “Oh, I’m _very_ upset about that.”

He curls his lip into a snarl. “Then _show me.”_

And just like that, they’re on Gallifrey, standing in the ruins of the Citadel.

They’re just images, nothing real, so she might as well have that knock-down drag-out fight: the Doctor flings herself at the Master and tackles him to the ground.

Even in their own minds, they’re more or less evenly matched, so it mostly devolves into biting and hair-pulling.

“Sure you don’t want to see how I did it?” he growls through bared teeth.

“I’ve seen enough of your little tantrums,” she spits, grabbing the front of his shirt and pulling so hard that the buttons go flying. “You got so wrapped up in your own petty sulking that you somehow managed to make the massive upending of _my_ entire life all about _you!”_

With a roar, he rolls them both over so that she’s pinned underneath him. “I don’t have much of a choice, do I?” he sneers. “I can’t trip over my own feet without you being there—you’re at the center of _everything!_ No matter where I go, it’s always Doctor, Doctor, _Doctor!”_ He tries to wrap his hands around her throat, but she brings her teeth down on his fingers when they get within range. “I can’t even _bleed_ without knowing that there’s a piece of you inside of me!”

“And how is that _my_ problem?” the Doctor demands, finally getting hold of his necktie and pulling.

“All of it’s your problem!” he shouts in her face—because his face can’t exactly be anywhere _else_ now, due to the grip she has on his tie. “Everything I am is because of _you—”_

“Oh, this again,” she interrupts derisively. “You know what? You’re right: everything you are _is_ because of me, but it’s not because of regeneration or genetics or anything related to the Timeless Child—it’s because you _chose_ to make me the center of your life! You _chose_ to be my friend, my rival, my nemesis… you _decided_ that I was better than everyone else, that I was important, that I was special! _I_ didn’t choose any of that— _you_ did!” Her voice is now so loud that she’s screaming at him. _“You_ decided that I was the hero and that you were the villain, so I had to become that hero! I didn’t want to be a hero! All I wanted to do was see the universe with my best friend and you _ruined it_ because you couldn’t drop your inferiority complex long enough to _let me in!”_

She releases her grip on his tie. The Master recoils and scrambles away from her.

“I loved you,” the Doctor says, her voice breaking, “but you made it perfectly clear, again and again, that you would rather die than accept that love.” She can’t bring herself to look at him. 

Something underneath them starts to tremble like a sudden earthquake and the scene shifts to a dingy dimly-lit room with a computer console. It’s familiar, but when she stands up the Doctor doesn’t see any version of herself here.

She does, however, see the Master. Twice.

One of them is in disguise but the other one she knows quite well: Missy. They’re on the Mondasian colony ship, and it’s the last day the Doctor ever saw her.

Their surroundings are still shaking, though. Something about this memory is unstable, the Doctor realises.

The disguised Master—the regeneration directly before Missy—is pointing a weapon at her, but Missy’s predictably unfazed. “I may be about to take that silly little gun away from you,” she remarks as they circle one another.

Even with the disguise and the fake accent, the Doctor can’t mistake the bitterness in that voice: “He’ll never forgive you, you know,” the previous version of the Master says. “He’ll never set you free. Not when he discovers what you did.”

The memory shudders and jumps back. “He’ll never forgive you, you know. He’ll never set you free. Not when he discovers what you did—” It jerks again and again, like a skipped record. “—never forgive you—he’ll never forgive you—never—what you did—he’ll never forgive you—”

The Doctor glances at the current Master, the one whose thoughts they’re both inside, and sees him still sitting on the ground, frozen in place and trembling while the fragment of memory repeats in bits and pieces.

“—never—never forgive you—never set you free—never—never—never—”

The scene is falling apart around them. The Master’s losing control and the Doctor doesn’t have much left of her own. “Stop,” the Doctor says urgently, then grabs his hand and pulls them both out of his mind.

They’re back in the prison and she’s still pinning him to the wall with her arm on his neck. They’re both shaking.

“And you never did,” the Master says. His eyes and voice are bleak.

“That’s not true,” she replies before she can stop herself.

“Yes it is: you never forgave me.”

“If only,” she whispers; it’s too late to keep her silence. “Oh, if only that were true.” She feels like she’s the one being strangled now, but it doesn’t stop the words from coming. “It’s so much worse than that: everything you destroyed, every ounce of pain, _every_ death and heartbreak… no matter what you’ve done, I forgive you _every single time._ I don’t want to, I try so hard not to, but it happens anyway. I keep forgiving you and I despise myself for being so…”

 _Weak,_ she wants to say. _You’re my greatest weakness._

But she moves on without saying it out loud. “I wish I could hate you,” she admits. “I wish it could be as simple as that: to feel something as pure and uncomplicated as hatred. I wish I could feel that and nothing else whenever I look at you—you more than deserve it for what you’ve done. I _wish_ I could hate you as easily as you hate me.”

Something in the Master’s eyes hardens and he leans forward until she can feel the warmth of his breath on her skin. “It isn’t simple,” he rasps—because by leaning in, he’s put additional pressure on his windpipe, “or uncomplicated… or easy. It never was.” He presses his forehead to hers.

_Contact._

They’re in the woods now, and up ahead is a doorway that blends in with its environment the way that a K9 Mark I blends in with a horse race at Royal Ascot. Missy and the Master’s other regeneration make their way towards the door to the lift, though she hangs back while the latter opens it with his laser screwdriver.

“Right,” he says, satisfied. “Come on then, hop in. Straight down: TARDIS.”

Missy’s smile is brief. “Come here,” she says.

He turns, slightly perplexed. “I’m sorry?”

She plants the tip of her parasol firmly in the ground. “Come _here.”_

“I don’t need to see this,” the Doctor tells their successor as she watches them hug.

The Master doesn’t look at her. “Yes, you do.”

“What, so I can see that you’re only full of self-loathing _some_ of the time?” She hears Missy tell the other Master how much she loved being him and how much she missed it… which is when the Doctor realises what’s actually going on.

She was right: the former Master steps away from Missy and reaches back to touch the spot where her hand was resting during their embrace. When he examines his fingers, they’re covered in blood.

The Doctor can’t help rolling her eyes. “I don’t need to see _this_ either. I already know how much you love stabbing people in the back.”

“Just _wait,”_ the Master snaps at her. They watch Missy help her wounded former self through the doorway and into the lift. 

“Missy,” the old Master calls out, his features twisting in hurt and confusion. “Seriously: why?”

She stops walking away from him and turns while obviously thinking it over. “Oh,” she answers at last, “because he’s right. Because it’s time to stand with him.”

“No,” the Doctor says, but her voice feels like it’s coming from light-years away. 

Missy’s expression grows increasingly resolved as she continues: “It’s where we’ve always been going, and it’s happening now, today.”

“No,” the Doctor says again, shaking her head. “You can’t have said that.”

“It’s time to stand _with_ the Doctor,” Missy concludes.

“You altered the memory!” the Doctor shouts, giving the Master a shove that nearly knocks him over. In the background, she can hear the other Master screaming furiously at Missy. “Why are you bothering to lie about this?” she demands.

“I’m not lying,” the Master says, regaining his balance. “This is what happened.”

“Then why didn’t she—” The Doctor understands why only a moment before the former Master aims his laser screwdriver at Missy and fires, sending her sprawling onto the ground.

“Because I’m my own worst enemy,” the current Master says quietly as his predecessors laugh at their shared agony. The lift door closes, sending one of them down to his TARDIS while the other stares lifelessly up at the trees overhead. “And obviously, by the time I regenerated, you were gone.”

“I’ve seen enough,” the Doctor whispers. Even though she knows that Missy survives, the sight of her lying there with her eyes open reminds the Doctor too much of a corpse.

The memory fades and they’re back in the prison. The Doctor removes her arm from the Master’s neck but stays where she is, still pressed against him. Everything feels slightly unsteady, like she’s slipping away from herself. She’s in desperate need of something solid at the moment, and he’s the closest thing that qualifies. “It doesn’t change what you did after that,” she points out. 

“No, it doesn’t,” he agrees. “I just thought you might like to know that it wasn’t _all_ for nothing, the time that you spent trying to reform me.”

He’s wrong: she doesn’t want to know that. She doesn’t want to think of the Master as yet one more person who died for her. There have been too many already.

“I think about it a lot, you know,” he continues. “What would have happened if the little prick hadn’t shot me. If I’d been able to get back to you in time.”

“For one thing, a whole planet of Time Lords would still be alive,” the Doctor says bitterly.

“There’s no way to come back from that.” His voice is quiet. “Killing your own people. There’s not much out there worse than that. So it’s really all for nothing now.”

“What do you mean?”

“I wanted to stand with you. I wasn’t lying when I said that. I really did. I might still, who knows?” There’s a slight edge of hysteria behind that last question, which vanishes under the intensity of what he says next: “But there’s only one way for us to stand on the same side now, and that’s if you join me on mine. That’s why I was hoping to break you by telling you about the Timeless Child: I thought that maybe I’d finally have enough of an upper hand that if I offered it to you you’d take it.”

“Take what?”

“My hand.”

She draws a shaky breath. “Well, I’m currently in prison and you’re one of the few people who knows I’m here.” It’s a joke, but also not a joke; she isn’t sure she can tell the difference anymore. “I think that’s a rather significant upper hand, isn’t it?”

“Does that mean you’ll take it?” the Master asks cautiously.

“Not the way that you want me to,” she answers, just as carefully.

“That wasn’t a no.”

There’s no point in denying it. “No. It wasn’t. But this isn’t one of your fantasies. If you’re coming here to see me, that’s what you’ll get: me. Not the version of me that you’ve invented in your head.”

His expression is hope and hesitation in equal measure. “And you know that’s what you’re getting with me too, don’t you?”

“Yes, I know.” The person whose company she enjoys every ninety days is the same person who destroyed Gallifrey. He’s the same person who murdered countless others, who backstabbed everyone he could get within stabbing distance of, who practically exuded spite with every word and gesture, who never saw a problem that he couldn’t make ten times worse, and who poured so much energy into conveying just how much he despised her and even more energy into convincing himself how much he despised her. They’re all the same person.

Not just that: they’re the same person as the boy she grew up with, as the friend and rival that shaped her into who she is now, and the living embodiment of all her missed opportunities and regrets.

The Doctor spends so much time on her travels trying to explain to people that if they took the time to understand one another’s complexities, things like war and hatred wouldn’t be necessary. Her problem, meanwhile, is the exact opposite: she knows too much about the Master’s complexities to ever keep an objective distance from him. 

She can’t pick and choose which pieces of him she stands with, and she’s running out of time to find a solution.

“So,” he says, “what now?”

She’s asking herself the same question. “Either you leave, we go back to trying to claw each other’s eyes out, or…”

“Or?”

If she had room to navigate, if she had a little more to work with, then maybe the Doctor could figure out a way to reconcile what she wants with what she believes, but there are too many things in the way: too many years in isolation, too many empty days and lonely nights, too many old memories for anything to feel real, too many doubts to know where to go…

Sometimes, she thinks, there are no good options. Sometimes you only get one.

All she wants is something to hold onto, to remind her that she’s real, and he’s already here and already willing, and at this point he probably needs her as much as she needs him: not vitally, but too intensely to count as mere wanting. Intensely enough that the absence would be painful, but not lethal.

Sometimes, she thinks, you don’t get to pick your life raft. Sometimes you have to grab onto whatever will keep your head above water.

Ever since their first kiss all those years ago, it’s been suspended in the air between them like a silent witness. So, in a way, what happens next is easy: placing a hand on his cheek, she guides them both back into the center, where their lips meet.

The Doctor braces herself for an explosion, a barrier crumbling and a loss of control on both their parts, but it never happens. Even while locked in an embrace, neither of them is willing to give in or give way, as usual. It’s for the best, really: afterwards (whenever “afterwards” happens), they won’t be able to claim that they didn’t understand what they were getting themselves into.

Neither of them loses control… but they do lose track of time just a little: it isn’t until the five-minute warning chimes that either of them notices that they’ve been leaning against the wall for the entire ninety minutes and making out for a significant portion of it.

“Next time,” she says after the one-minute warning goes off, “I’d appreciate it if you at least _pretended_ that you didn’t just run back to your TARDIS to immediately jump another ninety days into the future.”

“I’ll wait just long enough to come up with a really good story,” the Master assures her.

“You’d better.” They share one final kiss, and then she’s on her way back to her cell, silently cursing the slow path that she’s forced to take to their next meeting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Parts of the ceremony in the Doctor's dream are taken from the episode "The Wedding of River Song"
> 
> I took some of the inspiration for the current interior of the Master's TARDIS from [this amazing piece of art](https://aelizel.tumblr.com/post/618135717920620544) depicting it as a creepy haunted house due to damage from the Death Particle, but the version in this story is still slightly cabin-ish.


	3. Double-Crossing the Line

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Are you my nemesis or my better half?_   
>  _These days it matters less and less_

**Visits #14-#34**

They settle into a new kind of rhythm, though it shares many similarities with the old one.

The naps, for one thing, are no longer necessary—in fact, the Master confesses that his insomnia issues had more or less resolved after his fifth visit. The Doctor had suspected as much, but is surprised that he actually admitted it. They end up finding other uses for the bed.

He starts sneaking more things in with him, though it’s never anything significant or that she could take back to her cell—those are always intercepted the moment she leaves the room. After the first few times that she steals his shirt so she can wear something other than her prison jumpsuit for a few minutes, he starts dressing in layers. Even something as trivial as wearing a comfortable t-shirt and snacking on jelly babies while beating the Master at chess is enough to make the Doctor feel more like herself. 

It’s a bit depressing, knowing how little it takes now: a kiss, a scarf, a stupid joke, a scant ninety minutes of distraction… 

Sometimes, she thinks, you don’t get to choose your coping mechanisms. Sometimes “better than nothing” is the best you can do.

Even though she’d rather not make the comparison, it occasionally reminds her of when River was in the Stormcage prison and the Doctor would pick her up for various outings. Most of the years of their marriage took place during that period, and for the first time the Doctor imagines what it was like from River’s perspective: how much agency did she really have back then? Probably quite a bit—River often broke herself out of prison, so she wasn’t relying on the Doctor the same way that she’s relying on the Master now. Still, she wonders: how many arguments had River avoided, just because she was stuck in prison and the Doctor was not? How many complaints had River not voiced, just because the Doctor was her sole visitor? And worse: how many times had River said “I love you,” just because the Doctor was the only one who could hear it?

Missy had almost certainly been more accommodating because she knew she was at a disadvantage while imprisoned in the Vault. How different was River’s experience?

Now that she’s the one in captivity, the Doctor is forced to consider her own complicity in maintaining the imbalance of power in those relationships. Was she _ever_ the person she thought she was?

The Master’s visits are a welcome distraction from those questions: whenever he whispers “Doctor” in her ear, she feels a little more grounded, like she’s forgotten her name and he’s reminding her. In a way, she finally understands that incident in 1834 when he made her kneel and call him “Master”: without her naming him, he isn’t sure who he is. 

Years pass in ninety-day increments. The Doctor spends more and more of the days in between thinking about his next visit. She spends more and more time thinking about him. Slowly but surely, he’s becoming the center of her life.

He probably knows that, even though she hasn’t said it outright. He’s probably thrilled by it, and by how much of an advantage he has. He gives her trinkets and scraps of his time and she gives him her entire self because it’s all she has left to give.

Putting it that way makes it sound tragic, but the truth is that she’s happier now than she was during the two decades before the Master started visiting her. She’s happier on that ninetieth day than she is on the other eighty-nine days. 

Sometimes, she thinks, happi _er_ is all you can hope for. Sometimes happi _ness_ will always be just a little bit out of reach.

Of course, when was the last time she was completely happy? That problem started long before she was imprisoned. When was the last time _either_ of them were completely happy? Their similarities are becoming more pronounced, and the boundary between them is a little less defined than it used to be.

She can’t remember which one of them uses the term “domestic” first, but she does remember replying to the Master’s joke about “domestic bliss” with a crack that they’re more feral than domesticated.

It’s not bliss—neither of them would ever call it anything close to that—but it’s relatively pleasant being together, being connected, and being whatever “normal” is for them. Even though she’d obviously prefer to be somewhere other than this prison, there are moments that they’ve shared that almost make it worth the trouble: moments of surprise, of wonder, of discovery, of surprising vulnerability on both their parts… 

And above all, it’s comfortable. She isn’t used to being comfortable and is surprised at how much she appreciates it. It’s so comfortable, in fact, that if it was any other person, if it was any other set of circumstances, she might actually consider the possibility of making their legal arrangement a little less in-name-only.

It’s so comfortable that the Doctor can almost bring herself to ignore the reality that’s pressing down on her like a weight:

He’s not searching for a way to help her escape. He hasn’t for ages.

Because why would he? He’s got her right where he wants her: captive, isolated, and entirely dependent on him. And with those three ingredients, it’s only a matter of time before she breaks.

There’s only one way that he’ll help her escape and it’s the very first one he offered her: the tissue compression eliminator. All she’d have to do is accept it—but the version of the Doctor that escapes won’t be the same one who was locked up at the beginning. It will be the version of her that the Master devised: a Doctor willing to buy her freedom with blood.

And oh, he’d be so happy with that. She’d probably be happy too, because all the things that the old Doctor would have been sad about wouldn’t matter anymore, and the pair of them would burn down the cosmos together because there wouldn't be anyone out there who could stop them.

But there _are_ people out there who are waiting for her. She knows that. The knowledge isn’t much, but it’s just enough to keep her tethered to herself.

It’s just enough to give her the resolve to tell the Master, on his thirty-fourth visit, to not come back.

“I’m so close to finding a way!” he protests. “Just a little while longer—”

“I’ve told you everything I know about this prison,” the Doctor points out. ”You have all the information you need. So either you don’t know how or you don’t want to, and I think we both know which one it is.” She crosses her arms over her chest. “Tell me I’m wrong.”

A tiny—infinitesimally small—part of her wishes he _would_ tell her that she’s wrong, that for once in his life he’s actually on her side, and when he doesn’t answer she can feel that tiny part of her ache.

“I thought so,” she says with a sigh of disappointment—because she _is_ disappointed, in spite of herself. “Time for you to leave.”

He seems genuinely hurt by her rejection, which is really the only consolation she can take from this whole mess. “So you’d rather rot away in your cell than see me,” he hisses. 

“Yes,” the Doctor confirms, looking him squarely in the eye. “I’d rather be alone than used.”

To her surprise, the Master actually flinches at that statement. “That’s not what—” he begins, but cuts himself off when he seems to realise how defensive he sounds. “You’ll regret this,” he insists. “You need me.”

“Maybe,” she admits, “but you’re never going to know whether or not you were right, because this is over.”

For a moment, he looks like he might continue to argue with her about it—that he might even go so far as to press whatever advantage he has left—and although the Doctor isn’t worried about what the Master could do to her, she _is_ worried that any further argument from him, no matter how flimsy, might be enough to weaken her resolve. 

And if that happened, then she probably _would_ be lost—they both would, because if he kept coming and she kept letting him without the excuse of a bargain, it would mean that they needed one another more than they needed to protect themselves from one another. It would be so much worse than just the Doctor breaking: they would warp into something unrecognisable, something that wouldn’t so much burn down the universe for their own amusement as _devour_ it because they refused to let anything get between them.

The Doctor was supposed to fight the monsters, not become one.

Fortunately for both of them, the Master seems to realise what the stakes are as well. “I’d say go to hell,” he spits, “but it looks like you’re already there.” He storms out without another word from either of them.

They’re back to their old dynamic—bitter, spiteful, and painful—and he’s leaving her behind to die.

At least it’s familiar, and that’s a consolation as well, the Doctor thinks.

Ninety days later, he doesn’t come back. She stops counting after that.

* * *

There isn’t a symbol on the wall this time: the Judoon guards merely arrive at the Doctor’s cell, place a black bag over her head, and take her away. She counts the steps before the transmat beam—one hundred and eighteen—and then it’s another eighty-eight steps to a boat, where she’s pushed down into a seated position by hands that aren’t Judoon hooves, but humanoid fingers. The noise of the oars moving through the water echoes off the distant walls of what sounds like a stone canyon. 

Faintly, through the fabric of the bag, she can smell her surroundings. 

She’s been here before. 

The gravel crunches under her shoes when she steps off the boat and takes the handful of steps up and then down again. It’s so familiar that she knows exactly what she’s going to see when the bag is pulled off of her head.

Of course he’s here, a figure in garish purple amid the robed representatives of the Fatality Index: the rules of this place state that she can only be executed by another Time Lord. 

“Is it our anniversary already?” the Doctor remarks. “If I knew in advance, I’d have changed my jumper.”

“Cute,” the Master says drily.

“I’m always cute,” she retorts. “You should see me in that jumper.”

“I know what you’re thinking,” he says, “and no: I’m not here to save you.” She can see the sides of his mouth twitch into the hint of a smile. “In fact, I’m the whole reason you’re here.”

She makes an impatient gesture with her hand. "Get to the bragging, I know you love that part.”

“You’ve made some enemies, Doctor. Some very powerful enemies—”

“Which rules you out, then.”

He looks annoyed at her interruption. “Enemies who were extremely disappointed when you were let off with _only_ a life sentence. So disappointed, in fact, that they were willing to make a very generous offer to anyone who could provide enough new evidence to make you eligible for execution.” His smile widens. “And guess who you let freely rummage around in your memories? I found all sorts of things that they could use to build a case against your continued ability to draw breath.” 

“I knew all those parking tickets would come back to haunt me eventually.” She can’t help being flippant, but the discovery that he had manipulated her _yet again_ still burns inside of her. 

“The descendants of Adelaide Brooke, for example,” the Master explains, “were _very_ upset to learn that the noble Captain was psychologically manipulated into taking her own life.”

The Doctor had been doing her best to not react to his monologuing, but the mention of Adelaide is too painful to avoid. She can’t meet his eyes: not just because the Master had apparently been using her from the very beginning _yet again,_ but because his accusation was, to some degree, correct.

It doesn’t make his betrayal sting any less, of course.

“And all of those missing persons cases: young human women, mostly, who were last seen with the Doctor and never heard from again.” He pulls on his collar in a show of feigned awkwardness. “Not a good look, you know.”

She can feel herself starting to tremble. She wonders what would happen if she were to tackle him off the dais and into the water behind him. Maybe his current regeneration is one of the ones that can’t swim.

“But the thing that really pushed the authorities over the edge,” the Master continues, “was the horrible thing that you did to Gallifrey.” He tsks at her. “Destroying your own people? How could you?”

Now she can meet his eyes: fury is a highly effective remedy for shame. _“Excuse_ me?” she demands. “What _I_ did to Gallifrey?”

“You conspired with a wanted criminal and terrorist—turns out Ko Sharmus was a _very_ naughty boy before he joined the resistance against the Cybermen—to detonate an Eta-class weapon capable of destroying all biological life on an inhabited world. Millions of Time Lords—” He snaps his fingers. “—turned to dust with the press of a button.”

“They were already dead,” the Doctor snarls, “because _you_ killed them! Or did you leave that part out of your report?”

“And how could you possibly prove such a wild accusation?” the Master asks. “Conduct an autopsy? Look for DNA evidence? There’s nothing left, Doctor, thanks to you.” He winks. “And I really do mean that: thanks.”

She lunges at him, but the robed guards hold her back. “I cannot _believe_ you,” she hisses. “I was already in prison—what more do you want?”

“What I always want,” he answers. “To win.”

“And this is winning to you?” 

“Oh, absolutely. You know, I’m really looking forward to my impending widowhood.” He glances around at the representatives from the Fatality Index. “Anyone want to get dinner after? I’ve got some mourning to take care of first, but I promise it won’t take long.”

“Well, you always did look nice in black,” the Doctor remarks drily.

“Flattery won’t help you now.”

“Did it ever help me before?”

For some reason, the Master treats it as an actual question—or at least he’s thinking _something_ over. “Tell you what,” he says eventually. “I was planning on waiting till you were dead and slipping this on your corpse, but I suppose this way I’ll get to see your reaction.” He holds up an item between his thumb and forefinger: a gold ring. 

The Doctor rolls her eyes. “You shouldn’t have.”

“Come on, put it on,” the Master says, taking her hand. “Let’s have a touching final moment here.”

Much to her irritation (and probably fifteen other emotions that she doesn’t have room to feel, given her impending execution), she can’t quite keep herself from feeling that pull in the center of her chest as he takes her hand and slips the ring on her finger. “This isn’t even a Gallifreyan wedding custom,” she points out.

“What, you don’t want an Earth-themed wedding?” the Master asks, pretending to look shocked. “And here I thought I knew you.”

She feels her jaw tighten. “So did I.”

That’s what is tearing her apart inside: she used to understand him and she doesn’t understand him anymore. Maybe she never did. 

And now she’s about to pay for her foolishness with her life.

Underneath the dread, though, is a part of her that’s more offended than anything else, because he couldn’t even settle for killing her outright: he’d had to find a way into the prison and into her mind, and then set her up to be executed as punishment for the atrocity that _he_ committed, with the knowledge that he’d get to pull the lever that would trigger the precisely calibrated technology to end her life permanently.

She decides to tell him directly: “This was a ridiculous amount of effort to go to for something that you could have accomplished with a brick and a good swing.”

“It really was, wasn’t it?” he replies cheerfully. “How about one last kiss, love?”

“I’d rather die,” she snaps. “How convenient that I’ve got the option right here.”

“No need to be impatient: you’ll get your wish granted in a minute.” He’s still holding her hand, and before she can pull away the Master lifts it to his lips. 

It’s so much like what he did on his first visit. He doesn’t deserve her longing, but she doesn’t know how to stop that ache.

Might as well ask him about that as well: “The time we spent… _together,”_ the Doctor says bitterly after he releases her hand. “Was that part of the plan too?”

She expected him to flinch. Instead, he’s merely silent.

After what feels like an eternity, one of the representatives from the Fatality Index speaks up. “The prisoner will kneel,” he intones.

She doesn’t take her eyes off the Master as she kneels on the box in the center of the dais.

“The quantum fold chamber is prepared,” the representative continues, indicating the ornate cube rising out of the water.

Her own little Vault, the Doctor observes. She wonders what the Master will do with it—probably chuck it into the nearest black hole. He’s certainly not going to spend the next thousand years watching over her corpse.

“The sentence will be carried out,” the representative announces, then looks at the Master. “Executioner?”

“Oh, I’ve been looking forward to this,” the Master confirms gleefully, taking his place next to the lever. He smiles down at the Doctor. “Last chance to start begging.”

“What, you want to hear me ask you to teach me how to be _bad?”_ she scoffs. 

“Come on,” he goads her. “Plead, beg, cry—I might show you mercy. I’m fickle like that, you never know.” 

“Thanks, but I’ll take my chances with divine intervention instead.”

There’s a strangely brittle silence. Then he says, almost in a whisper, “Call me by my name.”

The answer is easy: “No.”

“Say it,” he hisses.

“What are you going to do if I don’t? Kill me?” she retorts. It’s the one thing he wants, the one thing he’s going to lose once she’s dead, so it’s the one thing that she has the power to take away from him.

“Fine,” he snarls, taking hold of the lever. “Any last words, Doctor?”

So this is how it ends, she thinks: no heroic sacrifice, nothing to make anyone’s life better or the universe any safer. Just another betrayal at the hands of someone she thought she understood, who is about to condemn her to the same fate she once rescued him from.

There’s no good way to sum that all up in one sentence. 

The Doctor runs her thumb over the metal of the ring and can’t help laughing at the sheer ridiculousness of it all. “This isn’t even real gold,” she tells him.

“No,” he confirms as a smile appears on his face, “it isn’t.”

She takes a deep breath as the Master pulls the lever.

And then there is nothing but agony, followed by the loudest silence she’s ever heard.

* * *

The Doctor opens her eyes and finds herself in a space that’s vaguely familiar.

It resembles a cabin… in places. 

“I see you’ve fixed the place up a little,” she remarks, sitting up on what turns out to be a sofa. “The corners actually look like corners now.”

The Master tosses the ring up into the air and catches it. “Good morning to you too,” he says. “When did you figure it out?”

“You love overcomplicated schemes, but even you wouldn’t go to all that trouble just to have me _executed,”_ she explains. “Plus, the material in the ring was just a little too chilly to be gold.”

“That was always the story they told us as kids,” he confirms. _“‘Chronodyne freezes time because it’s—”_

 _“‘—so cold,’”_ she finishes along with him. “It’s also slightly toxic, so I wouldn’t play around with it if I were you.” The Doctor winces and rubs at her temples. “You could have modified it so that the ring absorbed the _full_ blast, by the way.” 

“It had to look as real as possible,” he objects, “which meant some screaming before you were frozen in time. After the little trick you pulled during _my_ execution, they wanted to make sure that this one was actually fatal—meaning no pulse or brain activity. Not that you ever _had—”_

“Sure you want to finish that insult?”

The Master pretends to look disapproving. “That’s an odd way of showing your gratitude, you know. Especially because, now that everyone thinks you’re dead, there’ll be no more Judoon popping up to take you into custody: you’ve got a clean slate to start defiling with various crimes and misdemeanors.” He tosses the ring over his shoulder and grins. “Come on, it was clever, wasn’t it?”

“Well, I’m alive and no longer in prison, so it was at least _effective,”_ she concedes, before an uncomfortable possibility occurs to her. “Or am I just in a different prison now?”

“That’s up to you,” the Master says. He nods at something behind the Doctor, and when she turns to look she initially wonders if she’s hallucinating. 

“That’s my TARDIS,” she manages to stammer, partially out of confusion and partially out of the overwhelming rush of emotion she’s experiencing at the sight of her perfect blue box.

“Oh good, you recognised it. I’m sure its feelings would have been hurt if you’d forgotten it after only a measly three or four decades.” 

He’s being oddly casual about it and the Doctor is instantly suspicious. “You found my TARDIS.” She stands and examines it for any signs of damage.

“It wasn’t difficult.”

“You’re letting me _leave_ in my TARDIS,” she says.

“Would you rather I didn’t?”

And there it is: behind the Master’s feigned indifference is the question that he really wants her to answer. It’s possible that he’s sabotaged her TARDIS in some way, or that it isn’t really her TARDIS at all, but the Doctor gets the sense that she could leave if she wanted to. He does want her to stay, though—more accurately, he wants _her_ to want to stay.

He’s making a concession—maybe even an apology, though she isn’t sure what he’s apologising for. There are too many options.

Regardless, it doesn’t change her decision: Yaz, Ryan, and Graham probably think that she died on Gallifrey after sending them back to Earth in a spare TARDIS. She can’t bear to think of them grieving her death. “There are people waiting for me.”

The Master replies with a snort of amusement. “You have a TARDIS—right there, as you’ve helpfully pointed out. You could go pick up your pets five seconds after they arrived on Earth if you wanted.”

“And spend a little more time with you before I leave, then?”

There is the tiniest pause before he answers. “If you wanted. We could go see some of the spots we talked about—actually see them, instead of just imagining them. Come on,” he says, so close to pleading that the Doctor almost reaches for his hand in sympathy, “just one trip. Zap a few Daleks, have a snack, call it a night.”

She wants to tell the Master that it’s never “just one trip”: it’s always the first step down a path. One trip would turn into a second trip, and then another and another, and then it would be her new normal: every star, just like they promised when they were young.

And so, for a moment, she’s tempted.

But only for a moment, because he’s intentionally ignoring something and is probably hoping that she’ll be willing to ignore it too. “How long were you going to wait before putting your plan into action?” the Doctor asks. “If I hadn’t forced your hand by telling you not to come back, how many more visits would you have made?”

He doesn’t have an answer for her. Why would he? 

But she has an answer of her own: “If holding all the power is the only way you can stand to be around me, then you can’t be around me.” Not the real her, at any rate. 

From the look in his eyes, he understands. He doesn’t _like_ it, but he understands. “I screwed it up, then,” he says quietly.

“You ‘screwed it up’ a very long time ago,” she says, but not unkindly. There’s no need to be cruel when she doesn’t have to be. “Before I ever set foot in that prison.” This is probably their last opportunity to speak face to face for at least a little while, so she decides to tell him the rest: “I’ll say this much, though: you didn’t have to rescue me, but you did. And I did enjoy the time we spent together—well, most of it,” she amends. “Could have done without some of those strolls through our most traumatic memories… but on the whole, I’m glad you were there.” She leans in and kisses him. “Thank you.”

He places a hand on her cheek and returns the kiss. The Doctor keeps an imaginary line fixed in her mind and, once he crosses it—once they both do, really—she withdraws just a little bit. “I won’t forget this,” she tells him. “I won’t pretend that it didn’t happen. I promise.” Too much of their history together had been built on intentional omission: that they were ever friends, that they were ever nemeses, that they had ever cared, that they had ever hurt one another. But if these last few years taught her anything, it was the value of confronting her past. The Time Lords had already taken so much of her life from her—what was the point of depriving herself of any more of it?

She watches the Master struggle to get the words out. “Thank you… for helping with the insomnia… thing.”

The amount of effort it took for him to say that is actually pretty funny. “Might even help you again in the future, if you ask nicely,” she says with a smirk. “I should head out now, though.”

The door to her TARDIS opens practically the moment she touches the handle. “Missed me, old girl?” the Doctor murmurs. “I missed you too.” After closing the door behind her, she takes it all in: the wonderful feeling of home. When she examines the controls they seem a bit sluggish, but she can tell that it’s due more to the TARDIS’s version of drowsiness than any kind of sabotage or damage. “Have a nice nap?” She enters the temporal coordinates for Sheffield in 2020, but something stops her before she can pull the lever to send the TARDIS into the Vortex.

She’s not ready to leave quite yet. 

“Just need a minute,” she tells the TARDIS. “I'll be right back, I promise.”

The Doctor opens the door again. “One more thing,” she says, leaning on the doorframe.

The Master’s expression brightens. “Yes?” he asks eagerly.

“I want a divorce.”

He laughs—cackles, more accurately. “Sorry love, but they don’t believe in that sort of thing on Liaitia IV. Nothing to do but run out the clock on those thousand years you promised.”

“Even though I’m legally dead? I thought you were looking forward to that widowhood.”

“In a _shocking_ turn of events, I was lying about that,” he says drily.

“Which part?”

His smile is infuriatingly enigmatic. “Not telling.” 

“Guess I’ll have to go meddle in some of their early history myself.”

“Have fun with that: they were very fond of ritual flaying back in those days. Besides,” he adds, “even if you do get that changed, we’ve actually gotten married in at least a dozen other jurisdictions.”

_“Seriously?”_

The Master pretends to sigh wearily. “You do _not_ want to know what I had to do in order to get our encounter at Jodrell Bank to qualify as wedding vows.”

She answers with a genuine sigh of her own. “I really, really—”

“Love me?”

“—hate you,” she finishes, exasperated.

He laughs again. “You couldn’t hate me if you tried. Remember?”

“Let’s not keep testing that theory, all right?” The Doctor turns to leave again but then swivels back around. “I have a phone, you know.”

“I didn’t think that jumpsuit had pockets.”

“We texted for years, back when you were pretending to be O,” she reminds him. “You know how to contact me on it.”

“And?”

“The next time you want my attention, use _that_ instead of wreaking havoc.” She remembers the little buzz in her hearts whenever she got those WhatsApp notifications. “Give me a reason to miss you.”

“Naughty selfies?” he asks with a wink.

“If that’s what it takes,” she says, trying not to laugh. “I might not come running, but I’ll definitely reply.”

Their eyes meet and she can see whatever snarky reply the Master had prepared fade away. She braces herself for something dangerously genuine to pass between them: one more memory, one more touch, one more confession… one more reason to stay just a little longer.

But he looks away. “You should run along,” the Master says, stretching out on the sofa and closing his eyes. “Been a long day for me. I could do with a nap.” He opens his eyes. “You were right, by the way.”

The Doctor raises an eyebrow. “You never say that I’m right.”

“It _was_ our anniversary today. Pretty good present, wasn’t it?”

“Other than the bit where you recited a litany of my sins and then framed me for your own massacre,” she replies drily. “You’ll have a hell of a time topping it next year.” She takes a deep breath. “Sleep well.”

Just before she closes the door of the TARDIS, she sees the faintest hint of a smile on his face.

Back at the controls, the Doctor gives the console an affectionate pat. “Here we go, then. First day of freedom. Let’s find out what we’ve missed.” She pulls the lever and grins as the TARDIS makes the most wonderful sound she’s ever heard.

**Author's Note:**

> The song that inspired the title and lyrics quoted at the beginning of the chapters: [Charming Disaster, "Days Are Numbered"](https://open.spotify.com/track/7iU1QI4CTHOMjBO6JUz00h)


End file.
